Apple's HomePod has been the underdog in the "smart speakers" category since its introduction last year. It's more expensive than the offerings from Google and Amazon, and Siri doesn't seem to be as powerful. I haven't used Alexa or the Google AI assistant, so I can't say what the difference may be. But let me just say that HomePod is a revelation in audio quality, and its "smart" features are more than adequate for my needs. The most surprising aspect of HomePod is that it has finally let me put together an audiophile listening room without taking out a second mortgage!

At its most basic, HomePod is a smart speaker with Siri built in and truly gifted sound quality. It's a breeze to set up... you just use your iPhone to pair and copy settings, which takes about a minute. My first use was to add some smart light bulbs to the house, and with Apple's HomeKit app on the iPhone that's a simple matter too. To activate a new device, you just scan an icon on the packaging and then assign it to a "room" in your house. (In HomeKit, you can set up rooms and "scenes" for your devices.) Once set up, it's a simple matter to say "Hey Siri" and then turn on or off a given bulb. HomeKit also makes automation simple, so you can easily have lights come on and off at different times of the day. With scenes, you can automate multiple devices with a single command. For example, when I go to bed, I say, "Hey Siri, Goodnight," and Siri turns off the basement family room light and the foyer light.

I also subscribed to Apple Music as part of my movement to the HomePod, and I've thoroughly enjoyed being able to listen to any given album by voice command. Of course, HomePods are also AirPlay speakers, so you can easily play music to them from your iPhone, iTunes, or other devices. It's simple to play to multiple HomePods at once, and Siri can move the music from room to room by voice command if you so choose.

But the most surprising aspect of HomePod has been its audiophile sound quality. Even bass response is great, which is amazing given the small size of these speakers.

I got a new HomePod for Christmas (I already had two) and decided to put it in the living room. It sounded so wonderful I decided to buy another one and set them up as a stereo pair. That's when the true value of these little speakers became clear.

With two HomePods now in my living room, I finally have achieved an audiophile listening environment at a truly reasonable price. The two little speakers pump out amazing sound, and they only cost me about $700. To replicate a listening environment with traditional high-fidelity speakers would cost at least $2,000, because you need not only the speakers (minimum: $1,000), but also you would need a receiver/amplifier and some components to get music into the system: A CD player or turntable, for example. On top of that, you would need some place in the living room to house the speakers (much larger than HomePods) as well as the stereo components... and that means another piece of furniture as well as considerably more space than my current setup requires.

With my paired HomePods, I just need to plug them into the wall and put them on a shelf. And voila! Instant audiophile listening without all the other setup headaches and at a much lower cost.

And I love the fact that the speakers have Siri built in, which means I can raise or lower the volume by voice, get information on what's playing, skip a song, or repeat... all by simply asking Siri.

The HomePod's audio quality is more than just a differentiating factor when you compare it to Google and Amazon speakers. It truly is great enough to compete with high-end speakers costing much more, and you can easily set up a listening environment that will tickle the ears of even the pickiest audiophile. A surprising punch for such a tiny device.

The iPad is the future for home computing - Computerworld. My iPad hasn't arrived yet (I opted for the 3G version, since I don't believe in cellphones and their parasitic subscription fees), but from what I know this Computerworld writer is spot-on. Not only am I a cellphone luddite, but a laptop one as well. I bought a MacBook Pro a couple of years back, but just couldn't make myself need or want it. (Ended up giving it to my wife.) But the iPad sounds like the laptop I've been waiting for! And it also means that, as much as I rely on my iPod Touch for eBook reading now, I'm very much looking forward to getting my mitts on the new iBook store. This is a great summary review of the iPad and captures all the salient reasons why Apple has another (and perhaps its biggest yet) hit on its hands.

Smackdown: Windows 7 takes on Apples Snow Leopard. Now, this is more like it! Whereas the earlier ComputerWorld reviewer basically called the OS's an even match (while exposing a lot of his own ignorance about Mac OS X), this fellow understands completely. In his closing remarks, he concludes:

As an IT professional, I support both operating systems at work. But I have Macs at home; after all, who wants to troubleshoot computer problems on their own time? My final verdict in this smackdown? It's not even close: Snow Leopard is the better OS.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Living on Air: A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac. In this case, said Guru had avoided trying out a Mac for 25 years and finally took the plunge, only after being assigned to do so. Lucky him, he got to play with the latest model MacBook Air, but his article spends more time explaining why he now understands the appeal of Mac OS X. Though he does get a number of things wrong (heck, he only spent 2 weeks with the OS, but sadly writes as though he's now an expert on it), I think we can count him in the Switcher camp.

Too good to ignore: 6 alternative browsers

Computerworld goes beyond IE, Firefox, and Safari to take a look at six lesser-known and -used web browsers for both Mac and Windows. It's interesting to note that three of the six are based on WebKit, the core engine used in Safari.

This second part of my report on the iPhone application marketplace covers the class of software that, while still falling squarely in the overall eReader category, is designed primarily for storing and managing documents. The primary distinctions between this class and the one covered in Part 1 are that the eReader apps discussed here:

1. Handle a wide variety of common file formats found in the workplace, rather than just text and proprietary eBook formats,
2. Don't include controls for customizing fonts,
3. Don't let users do full-text search on documents,
4. Have good embedded browsers and follow web links,
5. More easily let users move files to and from their iPhones, and
6. Typically let users organize and rename files and folders within their interface.

It still surprises me how rapidly this market is evolving, and that evolution makes keeping tabs on the capabilities of each application--and even on the entire set of applications--quite challenging. As I was finalizing this report, a new application in this class came to market that,

it turns out, I've found to have among the very best features of any that came before. I have no doubt that many of the applications reviewed here will continue to be refined, rendering this snapshot fairly obsolete fairly quickly. But the observations here accurately reflect the current state of iPhone eReaders. (As mentioned in Part 1, all of these applications work equally well on both the iPhone and iPod Touch. For simplicity and brevity, therefore, I'll use "iPhone" to refer to both devices.)

This second installment covers 13 applications:

1. Air Sharing
2. A.I. Disk
3. Annotater
4. Briefcase
5. Caravan
6. DataCase
7. File Magnet
8. Files
9. Folders
10. iStorage
11. Mobile Studio
12. TextGuru
13. TouchFS

As was the case for the applications primarily for reading text, none of the eReaders designed primarily for managing documents fully satisfies all of the requirements I've specified for them. Nearly all of them show red blocks in the matrix of capabilities that follows this introduction. There are also too many "light green" blocks in the requirements designed as key (those in boldface with the shiny highlight). If I could conglomerate the best features of each application, however, I'd have what I consider an ideal eReader, one that would satisfy all of the following requirements (in no particular order):

• Handles most native file formats (including documents with images)
• Formats HTML documents appropriately
• Can organize documents into folders or categories
• User can add bookmarks within files
• Handles both portrait and landscape reading modes
• Follows web hyperlinks
• Lets user manage files and folders on the iPhone
• Works offline
• Easy to read and navigate documents
• Easy to add documents
• Provides a "full screen" mode
• Resizes content automatically for both portrait and landscape modes
• Remembers where you stopped reading

Because their orientations are quite different, the set of requirements for these "Document Manager" applications differs as well. Most of the above requirements are pretty self-explanatory, and I explained some of them in Part 1 of this review.

As noted in Part 1, any application that fully succeeds as an eReader must be able to read, navigate and appropriately format HTML documents. Whereas most of the applications covered in Part 1 could do that, only two in this list can. By "appropriately," I refer to the ability to wrap text lines while maintaining a given font size. HTML isn't PDF, and shouldn't be formatted as such. Most of these apps do this "appropriate" formatting for Word documents, and there's no reasons why they can't/shouldn't do this for HTML. That said, if an HTML file has been formatted using a rigid table structure, or if its text elements are set to specific widths using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), an eReader can be forgiven for not parsing such files into device-agnostic HTML. (However, eReader software should check to see whether an HTML file has a separate "print" CSS style, which typically removes such formatting and can be re-wrapped with a decent font size for the iPhone.)

Unfortunately, nearly all of these applications have a file-size limit, and I used one long test HTML document (about 700kb) that consistently crashed them. The exceptions were applications like TextGuru, which warned me that it couldn't handle such large files rather than trying to load them and then crashing. The file size limit seems to be much higher for some file types (e.g., PDF and web archives) than for others.

By "Easy to read and navigate documents," I mean the extent to which an application presents a document's text at a readable type size, and to which it provides appropriate navigation controls. Relying solely on the iPhone's native "tap" and "swipe" gestures isn't usually sufficient, since such gestures don't necessarily translate into navigation actions. For example, it's typical for a double-tap to mean "expand text view to fit the display," yet some of these programs also expect such a gesture to move a document forward or backward a page. Confusing the two makes navigation pretty difficult. Similarly, some of these applications use a tap gesture to mean "unhide navigation controls" when a user is in full-screen mode. If this is the case, and the user can only navigate by tapping, the full-screen mode becomes worthless. For navigating and reading documents, the best apps in this list are Air Sharing, Briefcase, File Magnet, and Files.

Since a major distinguishing factor of this group of applications is their ability to let users manage documents, it's pretty important that they provide ways for users to do just that. This means not only being able to move folders of files from your desktop computer, but also being able to rearrange and rename files and folders on the iPhone. Otherwise, the software doesn't really work optimally as a document manager. The best applications for this feature are A.I. Disk, iStorage, and MobileStudio.

One of the tantalizing possibilities that these applications offer is the ability to not only browse the web from within their interface, but also to be able to save web documents to the iPhone. Sadly, only one of these (Caravan) can actually do that at this time; hopefully others will take up the challenge eventually. That said, several of the apps have well-designed, integrated web browsers that let users follow links to the web and easily find their way back to the starting document without having to leave the application's interface. Those that have mastered this trick so far are Air Sharing, A.I. Disk, Caravan, iStorage, MobileStudio, and TouchFS.

A general complaint I have about these application is their inability to display PDF files appropriately in either portrait or landscape mode. In both cases, the display should focus on the text or page margins, not on the page borders. Not doing so makes PDF files difficult to read and navigate. The only app that handles PDF files well is Annotater, which specializes in that format. Annotater (yes, it's really spelled that way) at least eliminates the irritating "page border" and focuses on the page margin. It also automatically resizes PDF files in landscape mode, another important factor in PDF readability. PDF readers could be improved, however, by providing a "zoom" feature that would adjust the display to the text, rather than to the margin. It's difficult to do this by pinching, and after that, navigation can suffer if the document display slides off to the right or left.

As the matrix that follows this introduction shows, all 13 of the reviewed applications have something to recommend them. For specialized uses, nearly any one of them would work well. The only ones I can't recommend at this time are Folders, iStorage, TextGuru, and TouchFS. Of these, iStorage has some remarkably good ideas, but they aren't all well executed in the current release. TextGuru is designed primarily as a text/code editor, and its file-management and eReader features clearly haven't been the focus of the developer's attention.

For overall usability as a tool for reading and managing documents on the iPhone, and other textual material, Of the 13 applications reviewed, I found three that are clearly superior, and three others that, while not as good as the top three overall, are certainly good enough to recommend:

• A.I. Disk
• Air Sharing, and
• MobileStudio.

Followed by:

• File Magnet
• Files, and
• DataCase.

If you already have an account with Apple's MobileMe service, or with any other WebDAV service such as Box.net or MyDisk.se, A.I. Disk is an obvious choice. Not only does it integrate seamlessly with such services, but it comes the closest of this group to meeting all of the requirements for applications in this category of eReader. In fact, it is the only one that doesn't fail a single requirement. Incidentally, A.I. Disk is made by the same company, Readdle, that released the excellent ReaddleDocs application, which I rated as one of the top eReaders in the "text reader" category in Part I of this report. (It's worth noting that A.I. Disk was released after I had nearly finished this review, and in fact its release ended up delaying the review so I could include it.) The main weakness with A.I. Disk, however, is that it relies solely on external WebDAV servers for file management, and can't move files directly from your computer.

Air Sharing makes the top cut on the strength of its terrific navigation tools and overall ease of use. Those and its ability to share documents directly with other iPhone users overcome its biggest weakness: Air Sharing doesn't let users manage their files and folders directly on the iPhone. Rather, you must set up folder structures and populate them with files on your computer and then sync with the iPhone. Hopefully, the developer will address this problem in a future release.

MobileStudio (originally known as MobileFinder until Apple asked the developer to change it) excels at just the task that Air Sharing leaves out: Creating, moving, copying, and renaming files and folders on the iPhone. MobileStudio was also the first app in this class that lets users create and edit text file. It can even read and write .zip files, and you can set specific permissions on each file or folder--all within its interface. However, MobileStudio is weak in document navigation. Although it offers a full-screen mode, its lack of navigation options in that mode make it functionally useless. (For more information on this, see the detailed description of MobileStudio.)

The next three applications in the recommended list (these are designated with a light-green background in the summary matrix) all have some excellent features that may trump those at the top, depending on the weight you place on each requirement. Files is easy to use and makes reading documents pleasant, but it can't manage files on the iPhone and doesn't have an embedded web browser. File Magnet has the best reading environment of any of these apps, as a result of its innovative "tilt scrolling" and "auto-scroll" mechanisms. Its biggest weaknesses are lack of bookmark support and inability to manage files and folders. DataCase has good built-in navigation controls and automatic "full screen mode." It's also one of the easiest to set up and move files to and from the iPhone. However, it doesn't let users create, rename or rearrange files and folders, it's not particularly good at displaying HTML or handling web links.

The remainder of this report consists of a summary matrix showing the various capabilities and usability features of each application. In the matrix, a green block indicates that the app fully meets the requirement, and light green means a partial score. A red block indicates that the app fails the requirement, and light red means if partially fails. The gloss overlay highlights the core requirements for this category.

Following the matrix are separate descriptions of each application, organized into lists of "Special strengths," "Special weaknesses," and "Other notes."

Summary: e-Readers for Managing Documents (Table 1)

	Air Sharing	A.I. Disk	Anno-tater	Brief- case	Caravan	DataCase	File Magnet
	Capabilities
Handles native file formats, including images
Formats HTML documents appropriately
Can organize documents into folders or categories
Has password protection or supports encrypted files
Includes search tool
User can add bookmarks within files
Provides a table of contents
Handles both portrait and landscape reading modes
Follows web hyperlinks
Can browse and download files from the web
Lets user customize font faces and sizes
Lets user manage files and folders on iPhone
Can create and edit text files
Works offline
Works without external web account
	Usability
Easy to set up
Easy to read and navigate documents
Easy to add documents
Provides a full screen mode
Resizes content for both portrait and landscape
Remembers where you stopped reading
	Transfer Methods
Includes dedicated desktop software to transfer files
File transfers from documents stored on the web
File transfers from computer via FTP/Bonjour/WebDav
	Overall Rating
	✓	✓				✓	✓

Summary: e-Readers for Managing Documents (Table 2)

	Files	Folders	iStorage	Mobile Studio	TextGuru	TouchFS
	Capabilities
Handles native file formats, including images
Formats HTML documents appropriately
Can organize documents into folders or categories
Has password protection or supports encrypted files
Includes search tool
User can add bookmarks within files
Provides a table of contents
Handles both portrait and landscape reading modes
Follows web hyperlinks
Can browse and download files from the web
Lets user customize font faces and sizes
Lets user manage files and folders on iPhone
Can create and edit text files
Works offline
Works without external web account
	Usability
Easy to set up
Easy to read and navigate documents
Easy to add documents
Provides a full screen mode
Resizes content for both portrait and landscape
Remembers where you stopped reading
	Transfer Methods
Includes dedicated desktop software to transfer files
File transfers from documents stored on the web
File transfers from computer via FTP/Bonjour/WebDav
	Overall Rating
	✓			✓

Air Sharing

Version 1.0.3, $6.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Document lists can be resized by pinching
• Features navigation menu by clicking the top toolbar
• Can connect and share files directly with other iPhone users
• Handy navigation controls overcome some of the limitations of the click/double-click method. The next/last page buttons on the toolbar are especially helpful in navigating PDF files. Air Sharing also has an icon in the top toolbar that takes you back to the beginning of the file� really helpful for long files!
• Air Sharing remembers where you left off reading, and on launch returns you to the folder of the document you were reading last.
• Excellent web browser integration: If you link to a web page, you can continue browsing as needed and then use Air Sharing's back/forward buttons to return to where you started. However, you can't download web pages as you browse them.
• Automatic full-screen mode.
• Very useful built-in Help.

Special problems

• Support for RTF documents is still very iffy. Often, opening one crashes Air Sharing. When it doesn't,
• formatting can become goofy--for example, everything starts to become underlined, and hyperlinked words or phrases get changed to "hyperlink." However, Air Sharing's documentation lists RTF and RTFD as supported formats.
• Doesn't follow links in PDF files
• Air Sharing doesn't let you set up files and folders on the iPhone, or move files or folders around within the folder hierarchy. To set up folders, you need to design the hierarchy on your desktop computer and then synch with the iPhone.
• Has a little difficulty switching between landscape and portrait modes, often getting stuck in between modes, or changing very slowly.

Other notes

• Air Sharing supports the file formats that Safari does (including .webarchive files written from Safari), as well as Microsoft Office formats supported on the iPhone. Support for iWork files is limited to the file preview embedded in the file package, and support for RTF/RTFD isn't reliable. One extra class of formats Air Sharing supports is source code, which it can display with appropriate syntax colors.

A.I. Disk

Version 1.0.1, $7.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Developed by Readdle, makers of the excellent ReaddleDocs reader, A.I. Disk is extremely easy to set up if you have an account with one of the supported WebDAV servers. Out of the box, A.I. Disk can connect to your MobileMe, Box.net, or MyDisk.se accounts, and you can add whatever other WebDAV servers you may use.
• A.I. Disk makes it quite easy to create new folders and to move documents and folders around within its interface.
• You can easily follow hyperlinks to web pages using the build-in browser, and A.I. Disk maintains back/forward buttons so you can find your way "home." Like most other apps in this category, however, you can't save web files to A.I. Disk.
• Supports adding bookmarks within your files.
• You can add an extra layer of security to your document store by setting a separate passkey.
• A.I. Disk offers a handy slider for moving quickly through large files.
• The software adds an "automatic bookmark" to return you to where you left off reading a document, though it always defaults to show you your root library folder when starting up.
• You can email documents from within the software's interface.
• In addition to Microsoft Office, HTML, and PDF formats, A.I. Disk offers full support for Apple-specific formats like those from iWork as well as Safari web archives. Curiously, it can't read RTF files, though.
• For relatively short files, A.I. Disk does an excellent job at resizing to fit both portrait and landscape mode, and it also reformats HTML files appropriately to fit the display (excluding files that have pre-formatted tables or CSS styles).

Special weaknesses

• A.I. Disk doesn't handle the display of large documents very well. It seems to take an unusually long time to finish loading such files, although it starts to display some of it fairly quickly. I found the early display more frustrating than endearing, since I couldn't use any of the controls or otherwise navigate the document until the entire file was loaded.
• On a related note, although you can manually activate full-screen mode, the change can take quite awhile for long documents, and equally long switching back. In addition, when in landscape view, the control for restoring the navigation bars disappears, so you have to switch back to portrait mode to close the document or do anything else.
• One of A.I. Disk's biggest weaknesses is its inability to transfer files from your computer. If you want to get such a file to A.I. Disk, you must first upload it to your favorite WebDAV account, and then download it to the iPhone.
• It would be nice if A.I. Disk offered a way to upload files to your WebDAV servers, but it doesn't at this point.

Annotater

Version 1.2.619, $4.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Annotater is unique among the current crop of eBook readers for iPhone in that it is based solely on the PDF format, for which it has the best support. It is the only app that includes full-text search of PDF files, and the only one that supports PDF bookmarks (or the table of contents you can set up in Acrobat).
• Another unique characteristic of Annotater is that it supports PDF annotations, including drawing (in various colors, with your finger), text notes, and bookmarks.
• Annotator is the only application that does a good job of eliminating the screen-real-estate-wasting border that seems to be the default way of presenting PDF files.
• Synchronization through Annotater's desktop "Annotater Service" application is automatic and very fast. Once done, you can browse the files and decide which ones to keep. Whenever you launch the app, you can resynchronize, or add new folders to transfer. If you add more files to a desktop folder, you can have Annotater Service "reindex" the folder, making the iPhone aware of the new documents.

Special weaknesses

• The desktop app only accepts folders to synchronize with the iPhone, not individual files. The folders, however, can be deeply nested if necessary. You cannot change the folder structure on the iPhone, or in the desktop app. The organization must be set up on your file system. Annotater will only synchronize any PDF files it finds in the folder structure
• To use other file types, you need to first convert them to PDF, as Annotater cannot read HTML or any other native file types.
• Annotater does not support encrypted PDF files.
• No full-screen mode, although Annotater's settings let you define the toolbar's transparency, making it possible to read through.
• The application provides no navigation controls while reading documents.

Other notes

• Annotater relies on a wireless, Bonjour-aware desktop application ("Annotater Service") that supports only Mac OS X (at the moment). The restriction to Mac OS X support probably reflects the fact that any file on the Mac can be "printed" out to a PDF file.

Briefcase

Version 1.1, $4.99 (Lite version, free) Home Page

Special strengths

• Briefcase is the most impressive application so far with respect to ease of connection to your computer and the ease of transferring files back and forth. You literally have to do nothing but log in. Briefcase identified any Bonjour-enabled computers on your network and presents them instantly in its interface. You have the option of having Briefcase remember your password, but the app warns you to use the iPhone's password-lock tool if you do.
• You can not only connect to local computers, but also to any remote computers on which you have accounts. Even more useful for most users, iPhone users can transfer files among each other, assuming they have appropriate permission to do so.
• Downloads that are interrupted when you quit Briefcase will be automatically resumed the next time the software is started.
• Briefcase remembers where you left off reading and returns you there. But it doesn't remember which file you last had open or offer to reopen it.
• For Mac users, Briefcase offers a plethora of special features for uploading files to your Mac, including:

• Adding image files to iPhoto
• Adding audio files to iTunes
• Opening files automatically on the Mac
• Setting images as your desktop background
• Selecting specific folders to upload files, which you can bookmark in Briefcase for quick access later

Special weaknesses

• Although you can download folders from your computer to Briefcase, there's no way to move files to folders, create new folders, or rename files or folders from within Briefcase.
• In a typical first-release symptom, Briefcase's interface remains in portrait mode when you switch to landscape, making navigation and bookmark-setting awkward. Also, bookmarks you set in landscape mode don't take you to the same location when in portrait mode.
• In the 1.0 release, I found Briefcase frequently ran out of memory and started acting erratic or bumped me back to the iPhone screen.
• Many of Briefcase's special features are only relevant to Mac users. That doesn't make them any less special, but from the perspective of a Windows user, it makes Briefcase less useful. As the developer explains in his FAQ for Briefcase,

  While Briefcase was designed to work optimally with Macs, Windows users (with a solid amount of technical knowledge) can use Briefcase as well. Windows does not support any open standards for remote login out of the box, including SSH which Briefcase uses. This means that one must install and set up an SSH server under Windows before Briefcase can connect.

  Presumably, a Windows user would also need to install Bonjour for the automatic network detection to work.
• Briefcase has a good built-in web browser that lets you follow links without leaving the app. Two problems, however, that hopefully will be fixed in a future release:
1. Once you follow a link, there's no way to get back to your previous page (or to the Briefcase document you started with), and
2. You can't save documents you browse to into Briefcase.

Caravan

Version 1.3, $2.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Caravan is another impressive iPhone app, which provides among the best integration between web, iPhone, and computer desktop. For connectivity to the desktop, Caravan relies on Bonjour and FTP. (Windows users will need to install Bonjour for Windows on their systems in order to use Caravan.) Unlike Mobile Studio, though, Caravan presents your file system on the iPhone, and lets you browse and download contents from within Caravan.
• Using the same Bonjour connection, Caravan also lets users transfer files from the iPhone back to your computer's file system.
• Caravan has among the best embedded web browser solutions in this roundup. Not only is the browser truly "embedded," so you can browse without leaving Caravan, but Caravan provides a "Download" button for every page you visit.
• Caravan has an excellent interface for creating and editing folders on your iPhone. In addition, when downloading files, the user can browse to the correct folder--or even create it--before saving the file. Once downloaded or created, file and folder names can be changed as needed.
• Caravan also lets users create and edit text files within its file system. These files are searchable.
• Caravan has a related feature called "Edit as Text," which can be used to make changes to text files (including HTML) you download from your PC or from the web.
• In addition to Microsoft Office formats, PDF, HTML, .webarchive, and text files, Caravan can also store and play audio and video files, and supports picture viewing.
• A nice feature missing from too many others in this category is that Caravan follows HTML bookmarks within files. (Often, other apps try to reload the entire page to the bookmark which can cause your session to be transferred to the iPhone's web browser.)

Special weaknesses

• Caravan doesn't let you move files to or from folders once they're created or transferred.
• The "Edit as Text" feature, though great in concept, can destroy Word files if you try to use it with them. In fact, the main weakness in this feature is that it appears as an action for all file formats� even videos and images� whether or not they're actually "editable."
• Caravan has no support for RTF or iWork file formats.
• The application does not have any facility for adding bookmarks or other annotations to files.
• Caravan has no full-screen mode and provides no in-document navigation tools.

DataCase

Version 1.1.1, $6.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Connects to Mac or Windows through Bonjour, setting up a drive in Finder or Explorer. Users can drag files to the drive(s) like any other folder on their system. This occurred without any action on my part.
• In DataCase, you set up drives on the iPhone, and each drive can have a separate set of permissions, including read/write/browse. You can also set the drive as hidden and can have the contents of the drive backed up via iTunes' normal iPhone backup.
• In addition, you can use a web browser to browse Database's content on the iPhone, using the iPhone's IP address at port 8080. Or, you can connect to DataCase's file store using FTP.
• DataCase lets you filter file your document library by type, and it supports in-document bookmarks.
• DataCase remembers where you left off reading a document, but not which document that was.

Special weaknesses

• Built-in navigation support is OK, with forward/backward and end/beginning buttons in the top toolbar. However, these aren't available in "full screen" mode, and DataCase doesn't support navigation of HTML files in this mode except by swipe. Further, there's no way to initiate full screen mode� it just seems to happen when you resize HTML to fit the display. I couldn't get full-screen mode to activate in PDF files at all.
• Follows web links in files, but doing so takes you outside of DataCase. This will close DataCase's connection with your PC, but DataCase warns you that this will happen.
• DataCase takes a long time, and often freezes, when trying to load long HTML documents. In general, the app is just not reliable for viewing HTML.
• A bug causes the DataCase interface to get confused now and then, with some buttons appearing where they shouldn't, etc. This requires closing and restarting the app.

Other notes

• Supports standard Office documents (Word, Excel), PDF, HTML, audio, video, and images. (I had no luck with video files, however). It doesn't read RTF files, nor .webarchive files saved from Safari.
• For PDF files, DataCase resizes content when switching from landscape to portrait mode, but doesn't do this for HTML.

File Magnet

Version 1.1, $4.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Very sophisticated and innovative navigation options, including a (for now) unique feature called "tilt scrolling." Using this method, you just tilt the iPhone to scroll the text� the more you tilt, the faster the scroll. File Magnet also includes a nice "page down" button that animates the text down one page, as well as a horizontal slider for moving quickly through the document.
• File Magnet has a very good embedded web browser that will follow hyperlinks within Word and RTF documents, including links to external PDF files. Within the browser, you can navigate to other web pages, but you can't get back to the document you started with from within this interface.
• File Magnet's file/folder list is better than most, since it provides very good icon previews as well as subtitles indicating file type.
• Though the application doesn't appropriately size text in HTML files, it does do this for RTF and Word documents.
• File Magnet has a very robust, automatic full screen mode, and it resizes documents automatically when switching from portrait to landscape mode.
• File Magnet remembers where you left off reading in all file types it supports, and it also remembers the folder you were last in. Most of the time, it also automatically re-opened the last file I was reading on launch.

Special weaknesses

• No support for PDF bookmarks or hyperlinks.
• Doesn't support bookmarks within documents.
• File Magnet doesn't support any kind of file or folder organization on the iPhone. Likewise, you can't rename or create files or folders. All of this must be done before adding files through File Magnet's desktop application.

Other notes

• Uses a simple desktop application, available for both Mac OS X and Windows, for moving files and folders to the iPhone.
• Supports jpeg, gif, tif, png, html, rtf, rtfd, doc, txt, pdf, iPhone compatible movies and audio files. Now also supports native Excel, Powerpoint, and iWork files, as well as .webarchive files.

Files

Version 1.1.1, $6.99 (Lite version, free) Home Page

Special strengths

• Files does an excellent job at handling a very wide variety of file formats. Although it doesn't resize HTML content to fit the display correctly, it does preserve HTML formatting, images, and CSS styles quite accurately. Besides handling the usual baseline of PDF and Microsoft Office formats, Files also fully supports Apple's iWork formats (Numbers, Pages, and Keynote), as well as web archive files.
• Files remembers where you left off reading� an unusual gift in this category of eReaders. However, it doesn't remember which file you last had open or give the option to start there.
• Files has good navigation features� in particular, providing a page up/page down button is useful for content that a user has resized with a pinch-type touch. This keeps the page from sliding left or right and maintains a steady reading view. Files also has "go to page" and bookmark navigation options, and users can move quickly up or down a document by holding the page up/page down buttons rather than tapping them.
• Although Files doesn't win any special points for readability in general, reading PDFs in Files seems to be especially practical. For whatever reason, text in PDF files are very sharp in Files compared with some other apps. That said, it's disappointing that the app doesn't automatically resize PDFs or HTML files when switching from portrait to landscape view.

Special weaknesses

• Users can add files and folders to Files when uploading from their computer, but there's no way to modify the folder structure or file names on the iPhone. Users can, however, delete files from the iPhone.
• Files can follow web links in HTML and Office documents, but not in PDF or other file types. Further, following links takes the user out of Files, making it difficult to continue reading your original document.

Other notes

• Files runs a WebDAV-enabled server that users can connect to from their desktop PC. Files provides the WebDAV URL on startup, and connecting to it is a simple matter (apparently a bit more complicated from a Windows PC than from a Mac). Files allows you to start and stop the server from within its interface. Once connected, the Files document store appears as a folder in the Finder or Explorer, and you can move files to the iPhone from this interface.
• To access Files on the iPhone, you must authenticate with a username and password. This security setting is optional and can be configured in the Files options window. In addition, you can optionally password-protect the Files store itself.

Folders

Version 1.4, $1.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Users can add folders and change the names of files (but not folders).
• Folders provides a built-in web browser that offers the capability of download HTML and other documents from the web. (However, see entry for this function in next section.)
• Folders lets users password-protect individual files and folders� in effect, "hiding" them from intruders.

Special weaknesses

• Downloading files from web is a great idea but is buggy and not very usable. The app reports an error with each file you try to download, and seems to download some of them multiple times. It wouldn't display a .txt file, but did display a .pdf one. The .html file I tried to download never made it.
• Many screens display a "tool" icon that doesn't work.
• Folders provides no way to transfer files to or from your computer, except by running your computer as a web server and connecting to that. The software description on iTunes speaks of being able to export files to your computer with WiFi, but I found no built-in way of doing that.
• Sometimes you lose the navigation icon back to your "home" list of folders and documents.
• You can't move files from one folder to another, nor can you add nested folders.
• Folders provides nothing in the way of in-document navigation.

iStorage

Version 1.0.4, $5.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• iStorage has the best tools of any of these apps for connecting to network file systems and servers, navigating them, and uploading or downloading files. You can set up numerous network drives, which can read FTP sites, your iDisk (and other WebDAV servers), nearby Bonjour devices (such as other iPhones), and any computers on your local network you have access to. You can define and have iStorage remember the connection information for each server for later use.
• With iStorage, you can bookmark files and/or folders on any of these network drives for quick access later on. The bookmark feature also applies to web pages you might encounter. This capability is unique among these apps, and it's almost enough to overlook iStorage's lack of in-document bookmarks.
• Although the rest of the application's interface is confusing, inconsistent, and just plain buggy, the home screen is very nicely set up and very easy to use.
• It's easy to create new folders (and subfolders) in iStorage and to move files into them.

Special weaknesses

• iStorage has a number of excellent ideas, poorly executed. It's not clear what kind of application it wants to be. For example:

• You can download HTML files just fine, but you can't view it except as source code. (You can, however, edit the source.) The HTML view provides good tools for zooming in text, but no control over font color (white) and background (black). In any case, since you have to read source code, what's the point?

• iStorage has a nice built-in web browser, and a setting that lets it "Switch To Downloads." However, the interface provides no way to download files using the web browser.

• iStorage has terrific connectivity to various document stores, but every document you try to download generates an error. Even if a document downloads, often the downloads are incomplete.

• The application has poor navigation and toolbar functions. When browsing a network drive, it's easy to completely lose a way back to iStorage's home screen, for example. Likewise, when viewing a document list, there's both an "Edit" button, which only lets you delete files, and an unclear icon on the bottom toolbar, which you must use to move files into folders; as in other similar apps, these should be combined. Finally, one of the icons just duplicates the action of selecting a file from the list.
• iStorage's file format support is weaker than most. In the latest version, I could now read Word and Excel documents in addition to PDF and images. However, that leaves HTML, RTF, .webarchives, and iWork formats, among others, that it can't help you with. Even text files I created on the iPod couldn't be viewed in iStorage.
• Prone to crashing fairly frequently.
• When you follow a hyperlink from a Word document and then close it to return to iStorage, the application returns you to document directory rather than to the document you were reading.
• iStorage doesn't remember where you left off reading, loading each document from scratch on each access. I also found it annoying that you have to go through a set of menu choices when clicking on a file, one of which is to open it. The choices are great ("Info," which is how you'd change the file's name among other things, and "Upload," which lets you move the file to a server), but since I hardly ever used them, I'd rather have my choice of defaults (which would be "open").

Other notes

• iStorage does a great job with switching from landscape to portrait mode when viewing documents, but it doesn't support this mode when traversing directories or using any other parts of the top-level interface.
• iStorage supports full-screen mode, but it's a manual process that's not totally intuitive.
• iStorage can follow hyperlinks from Word documents, but not from any other file type at this point.
• iStorage has a search feature that lets you search on filenames in a directory.
• For Word documents, iStorage resizes the file content when switching from portrait to landscape modes, but it doesn't do this for other file types that it can read (e.g., PDF).

Mobile Studio

Version 1.1, $1.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• One of the many impressive features of Mobile Studio is the ease with which users can copy, move, create, and rename files and folders, without relying on a desktop application.
• Mobile Studio is also one of the only apps reviewed that lets users create and edit text files within the Mobile Studio hierarchy.
• Mobile Studio also supports zip files. It can decompress zip files, and it can also compress files into zip format.
• This application has excellent security features. It lets you lock the application with a password, in addition to the password lock available for the iPhone itself. In addition, Mobile Studio lets users define whether a given file is readable/writeable/executable, effectively letting you "hide" files from external sources.
• Although it cannot download files from the web, Mobile Studio has an excellent embedded web browser, which lets users browse websites without leaving the app, as well as navigating backwards and forwards among the web pages they visit. Mobile Studio can follow hyperlinks in Word and HTML documents, but not in PDF or iWork files.
• The application provides a very responsive slider control for navigating long documents.
• Mobile Studio remembers where you left off reading (though not which file you last read).
• This app has unique tricks like importing images from your photo library with the option to resize and/or crop them before placing them in MobileStudio. Cool!
• Another unique feature of Mobile Studio is that it maintains a "trash can" that contains all the files and folders you delete� thus letting you restore files if necessary before deleting them for good.

Special weaknesses

• Mobile Studio does a good job of appropriately resizing Word and plain text document content to fit the iPhone screen, but it fails to do the same with HTML files.
• Users have no way to add bookmarks within their files, and there are no search or sort options.
• Setting up Mobile Studio for file transfer is harder than necessary, and is perhaps the most difficult of this group of apps.
• Navigating documents (I confirmed this in HTML, Word, and PDF) is a bit of a pain, since you can't use any kind of tap gesture to move back or forward. Doing so takes you out of full screen mode to use the slider. For HTML, this is also a problem since a double-tap gesture usually resizes the text to full width if it isn't already there.
• Mobile Studio has a handy "Home" button on the bottom toolbar, but every time I used it I ended up with a black screen and had to exit the application to actually return "Home."

Other notes

• Mobile Studio relies on FTP (and an FTP client) for transferring files to the iPhone. The app has built-in instructions for doing so from Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

TextGuru

Version 1.0.7, $4.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• Reading PDF and native Office documents with TextGuru is very good, with both landscape and portrait modes supported. Both of these modes offer full screen view and a slider for fast navigation. (The slider works better for Word documents than for PDFs.)
• TextGuru is first and foremost a text editor, so many of its greatest strengths pertain to those functions. Though irrelevant to its use as an eReader, TextGuru's ability to edit (including search and replace, cut and paste, etc.) HTML and text files is remarkable. Other file formats (such as a test Pages document) can be viewed/edited as ASCII or HEX.
• This application offers full-text search across your document store, and it can also do search and replace for editable files. For editable files, TextGuru navigates to the first instance of the search term and highlights it. However, there's no way to navigate to the subsequent instances.
• TextGuru not only remembers where you left off reading, it remembers which file you last had open and takes you there first by default. You can change this setting in the Settings pane.
• TextGuru is the only application in this review that by default reformat HTML content to a font size appropriate for the iPhone display. (Except, of course, where the HTML content is inflexibly formatted using tables or CSS styles.)

Special weaknesses

• No landscape mode for HTML files.
• No support for adding folders or editing document names. TextGuru's otherwise nifty FileServer software (available for both Mac OS X and Windows) also cannot share folders.
• The interface can become a little confusing as you switch from document viewing to document editing to document searching. Another confusing aspect is in the search feature for editable files. Doing a search here launches the "Search and Replace" screen, but the implication is that if you just enter a search, the term will be replaced with nothing if you don't enter a "Replace" term. (In fact, that doesn't happen, but this could be much clearer.)
• The search feature promises more than it delivers, in two respects:

• It delivers some false results (for example, a PDF file showed up in a search for the word "bold", but I determined that the word does not in fact exist in that file).

• It doesn't display the instances of the search text in the files when you open them. In the case of files of more than 1 or 2 pages, this renders the search feature less than useful.

• TextGuru reads neither RTF nor web archive files, and to read HTML files you must first bring the file up into its text editor, and then switch to a web preview mode.

TouchFS

Version 1.2, $14.99 Home Page

Special strengths

• TouchFS can follow hyperlinks in Word and HTML documents (but not in PDF files). It has an excellent implementation of an embedded web browser that doesn't take users outside of the TouchFS interface. The interface also lets user navigate backwards and forwards while they are browsing the web.
• For HTML files, TouchFS follows in-document bookmarks as well as external links.
• TouchFS lets users set up a username and password to authenticate against to protect access to the iPhone document store.

Special weaknesses

• TouchFS offers no ability to annotate or add bookmarks to your files on the iPhone.
• Users can't change the names of files or folders, or create or move them within the TouchFS interface.
• TouchFS has no built-in navigation tools to help users while reading long documents. All navigation relies on swipes, which don't work very well if you've enlarged a particular document (as you frequently want to do with PDF files.) Lack of navigation aids also hinders reading of HTML files, since a double-tap changes the page zoom as often as it causes a page scroll.
• The file list is difficult to use, since icons are so small you can't always tell what file type you're loading, and filenames typically don't display completely with the very large font size.
• TouchFS has no full-screen view.
• TouchFS resizes PDF files when switching from landscape to portrait view, but doesn't do the same for HTML. Like most of the apps in this category, it also doesn't attempt to appropriately format HTML to fit the screen with a readable font size.
• Expensive. Considering how many other, better eReaders there are in this category--all for much less money--TouchFS is clearly overpriced. It's by far the most expensive of the bunch ($14.99, almost twice that of the top-rated app here, A.I. Disk, at $7.99).

Other notes

• TouchFS supports display of PDF, Microsoft Office documents, HTML, and text files The application will display image files, but won't play audio or video files. It supports iWork formats using the document's PDF preview.
• Like some of the other apps reviewed here, TouchFS uses WebDAV and Bonjour to connect the iPhone to your PC. The user connects to the iPhone server, which sets up a folder in Finder or Explorer from which you can add files and folders.

The iPhone application marketplace now offers a tantalizing variety of tools that can be used as eBook readers and file managers. As I concluded in the September 2008 report, "Without Even Trying, Apple's iPhone Takes the eBook Reader Sweepstakes," the iPhone and iPod Touch hardware finally enables truly practical eBooks, and the software now available for the iPhone platform just clinches the deal.

Having worked with the growing number of these applications since the first started appearing in June, I've concluded that the market is clearly divided into two major objectives:

• Applications designed primarily for reading text (books), and
As I finalized this report, a 20th eReader for the iPhone was released, but is not included here yet. Libris is an application specializing in text reading and has features similar to eReader. Its interface is--how shall I put it?--quite ugly, and so far I've found it rather annoying and somewhat difficult to navigate. However, it does seem to do the job and has a desktop application that's much better than Stanza's for converting documents to PalmDoc format and transferring them to the iPhone.
• Applications designed primarily for storing and managing documents.

As I compiled notes and usability data on this group of applications, it became clear that trying to cover all 19 different applications for the iPhone that can serve as e-document readers in one article (a 20th was released just as I was finalizing this report) would be a bit much--for me as well as for readers. As a result, this will be the first of two installments of the overall report. (Note: All of these applications, with one exception, work equally well on both the iPhone and iPod Touch. For simplicity and brevity, I'll use "iPhone" to refer to both devices going forward.)

This first part covers the following iPhone applications, which are primarily aimed at reading text and HTML documents:

1. Bookshelf
2. Bookz
3. eReader
4. Evernote
5. Instapaper
6. iSilo
7. ReaddleDocs
8. Stanza

The second installment will cover applications that specialize in enabling document repositories on the iPhone: Air Sharing, Annotater, Caravan, DataCase, File Magnet, Files, Folders, iStorage, Mobile Finder, TextGuru, and TouchFS.

It's important to note that like any categories one devises for grouping things, theses two categories of necessity form a Venn Diagram. Some of the applications discussed in this article have characteristics that also make them useful for managing documents, whereas some of the applications that are most useful for managing documents are also quite good at reading text. Hence, my use of the qualifier "primarily" in the article title.

Although most of these "Reading Text" applications are quite good--especially given how little time they've been in production--one of the frustrating aspects of this crop is that there is no single one that incorporates all of the potentially desirable characteristics. Some of the lacking abilities are, admittedly, optional. However, once you encounter the ability in one app, its absence in others becomes noticeable.

Again, because their overall orientation differs significantly, I found it fairer--and more helpful--to draw up separate sets of basic requirements for the two groups of applications. I'll go into the requirements for the "Document Manager" applications in Part II, but here are the requirements for those reviewed this time (in no particular order):

• Formats HTML documents appropriately
• Can organize documents into folders or categories
• Includes search tool
• User can add bookmarks within files
• Handles both portrait and landscape reading modes
• Lets user customize font faces and sizes
• Easy to read text
• Easy to add documents
• Provides a "full screen" mode
• Resizes content automatically for both portrait and landscape modes
• Remembers where you stopped reading

I think most of these are pretty self-explanatory, but let me elaborate on a couple of them.

To traditional publishers of eBooks, use of HTML as a document format has been troublesome for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the difficulty of protecting copyrighted content using HTML. HTML is also perceived as being unable to easily handle included images, which some eBooks require. However, both Apple and Microsoft have developed archival formats for web pages, which encode the text and images into a single package. Although the package itself doesn't securely protect the content (there are "un-archivers" for both formats freely available), doing so is probably not beyond technical feasibility.

Sadly, only one of the applications in this review can handle .webarchive files (which you can create by saving web pages from Safari), which is a shame because this is the ideal, unlicensed format that preserves not only text, but also text formatting, tabular material, and images.

Still, a non-negotiable requirement, as far as I'm concerned, is the ability to read and appropriately format HTML. Fortunately, most of the applications in this list can do that.

By "Easy to read text," my main consideration is giving the user some control over the size of type that's displayed. If you can also change the typeface and/or display colors, that's a nice bonus. All of the applications in Part I provide this feature, and it's a major distinguishing factor compared with the applications in Part II, none of which provide any sort of font customization tools.

Finally, after some use I've determined that any e-Reader I'll use must work even if I have no wireless or other network connection. It's simply unreasonable to expect that Internet access will be available during my backpacking trip to Sequoia National Park or while taking in some rays at a remote beach on St. John. And those are just some of the places I'll want to have a good book along with me. A book that simply "stops working" is obviously no good, is it? As a result, I can't recommend some iPhone applications that have otherwise terrific features. My books must work offline. (Frankly, even if you do have wireless Internet, I've found that sometimes the servers hosting my online books report that they're unavailable. When was the last time a book you were reading told you it was busy and couldn't be read right now?)

As the matrix that follows this introduction shows, all 8 of the reviewed applications have something to recommend them. For specialized uses, nearly any one of them would work well. The only exception at this time is iSilo, which is just so badly designed that it's not only hard to navigate, but impossible to use in any practical manner.

For overall usability as a tool for reading books and other textual material, I've found five of the eight good enough to recommend:

• Bookshelf
• eReader
• Evernote
• Readdle, and
• Stanza

Bookshelf and Stanza are both excellent choices for general text reading, though they're quite limited in the range of document formats they support. Stanza has superior annotation capabilities, as well as full-text search that Bookshelf lacks, but Bookshelf makes it much easier to get content onto the iPhone and does a superior job of converting documents. Unfortunately, Stanza's desktop application, still in beta, is unusable for converting non-text document formats (particularly HTML and PDF) to text files, yet it leads users to believe that it can. To use files with Stanza, you really need to convert to plain text format before opening in Stanza Desktop, which is the only way to get personal/business content onto the iPhone.

One of the major weaknesses of both Bookshelf and Stanza is their lack of integration with any kind of commercial e-bookstore. This reflects their current inability to display DRM (digital rights management) content, which of course is the security wrapper commerical bookstores use to protect copyright. This means that your book choices are pretty much limited to public domain classics and other free books. I, however, want a reader that will easily let me buy the latest novels by my favorite authors, and that's the reason eReader is among the recommended applications. eReader has allowed me to completely eliminate reliance on paperbacks and other tree-killing book forms for casual pleasure reading. It's delightful and very reliable for this kind of reading, even though it lacks some of the primary requirements noted earlier. To purchase a book, I log in to the eReader bookstore and buy a book online. This places the book in my online "shelf," and when I launch eReader on my iPhone, the new book is there, waiting to be downloaded.

Readdle is on the recommended list because it's a terrific cross-breed between the text reader category and the document-storage category. Readdle can handle many kinds of native document formats as well as HTML, it excels at folder and file organization, and it has a well integrated web browser with which you can download files to your Readdle library. Readdle users also have an online account, which is a password-protected repository of their files. The repository accepts files through a web form, from email, or, for Mac OS X users, from a simple, drag-and-drop desktop application. Readdle lacks some of the standard features of the best text readers, such as customizable fonts and the ability to remember where you stopped reading. This latter weakness is mitigated, however, by Readdle's excellent bookmark support.

With its latest improvements, Evernote is now one of the applications I recommend in this category. Like ReaddleDocs, Evernote spans the "text reading" and "document management" categories, and it's chock-full of great features for gathering and managing a document and text collection that most of the other applications lack. Besides handling your everyday work or personal documents, Evernote can clip web content (similar to Instapaper) and, using its desktop or web interfaces, be used to create and edit content for the iPhone. Previously, its signature weakness that prevented me from recommending Evernote was its inability to work offline. However, you can now designate "Favorites" to be stored on the iPhone. Unlike any of the other eReader applications for the iPhone, Evernote's desktop software adds greatly to its overall value, with features approaching those of a full-fledged personal information manager. Still, it's not perfect: Evernote doesn't remember where you left off reading, so it isn't good for long documents. In addition, it doesn't support bookmarks or landscape viewing.

I really like Instapaper as well, but its use is limited to clipping web content and can't be used for storing/viewing personal or business documents. That said, Instapaper excels at saving web content for later use, and its ability to specially format HTML content for the iPhone is remarkable. For clipping full articles to read later, nothing beats Instapaper at the moment.

The remainder of this report consists of a summary matrix showing the various capabilities and usability features of each application. In the matrix, a green block indicates that the app fully meets the requirement, and light green means a partial score. The gloss overlay highlights the core requirements for this category, and red blocks show which application fails to meet those requirements.

Following the matrix are separate descriptions of each application, organized into lists of "Special strengths," "Special weaknesses," and "Other notes."

Summary: e-Readers Primarily for Reading

	Book- shelf	Bookz	eReader	Ever- note	Insta- paper	iSilo	Readdle	Stanza
	Capabilities
Handles native file formats, including images
Formats HTML documents appropriately
Can organize documents into folders or categories
Has password protection or supports encrypted files
Includes search tool
User can add bookmarks within files
Provides a table of contents
Handles both portrait and landscape reading modes
Follows web hyperlinks
Can browse and download files from the web
Lets user customize font faces and sizes
Lets user manage files and folders on iPhone
Can create and edit text files
Works without external web account
	Usability
Easy to set up
Easy to read text
Easy to add documents
Provides a full screen mode
Resizes content for both portrait and landscape
Remembers where you stopped reading
	Transfer Methods
Includes dedicated desktop software to transfer files
File transfers from documents stored on the web
File transfers from computer via FTP/Bonjour/WebDav
	Overall Rating
	✓		✓	✓			✓	✓

Bookshelf

Version 1.2.1309, $9.99

Special strengths

• Excellent for reading text and HTML files, since the Bookshelf reader reformats them for the iPhone display and lets the user select font and font size for viewing.
• A recent update added welcome support for RTF files (but not for RTFD).
• Excellent navigation tools. Besides the usual click up and down to move from page to page, Bookshelf now includes a nice slider that lets you skip multiple pages forward or back.
• Has a customizable auto-scroll mode.
• Easy to use bookmarks function, and remembers which document you were reading and where you left off.
• Excellent website support and bug-tracking/feature enhancements section.

Special weaknesses

• Only supports HTML and text formats, plus some eReader formats (e.g., PalmDocs). Bookshelf tries to convert Word documents, but doesn't do so well enough to be useful.
• Hyperlinks in HTML files do not work.
• Doesn't support image files (in the documents I transferred).
• Although you can organize files into folders prior to transferring them to Bookshelf, after that you can't change the file names, or move them to folders, etc, on the iPhone Touch.

Other notes

• Uses free Java QuickStart desktop app to move files to iPhone (through a wireless Bonjour connection).

Bookz

Version 1.3.2, $4.99

Special strengths

• Remembers where you left off reading
• Integrated full-text search
• Has cool page-flip animation for turning pages.
• Excellent support for bookmarks and tags.
• Portrait or landscape mode, but must be changed manually with the toolbar button (not by tilting device)
• Very readable with good customization for colors, fonts, and margins.
• Well integrated web browser includes support for bookmarks.
• Useful navigation widget lets you see, by percentage, how much of the document you've read and then use the slider to move backward or forward.
• Provides fine-grained customization for click control. Bookz lets users divide the display into 9 quadrants, each of which can be set to handle next page, previous page, toggle full-screen mode, show bookmarks, or add bookmark.

Special weaknesses

• Supports only text files for now; displays only source code for HTML.
• No facility for transferring files from computer. (The idea is that you'll get text files from web downloads or from libraries like Project Gutenberg.)
• Can't add folders to device's library
• Uploaded a .txt file to Google's Pages site, but the software wouldn't download it per the developer's instructions
• Can't activate landscape mode when using the web browser.
• Web browser offers to download "web pages," but then the application won't display it (except as source code).

eReader

Version 1.2, Free

Special strengths

• Integrated search, including easy tool for finding next instance, and ability specify the starting page for the search.
• Provides an integrated table of contents, from which you can select the desired chapter.
• Remembers where you left off reading.
• For books purchased from a compatible online store, eReader is the best application available today for overall readability.
• Though it doesn't support the use of folders, eReader has built-in sorting tools for books by name, author, and date.
• Excellent, customizable navigation controls and automatic full-screen mode (toolbars can be re-summoned with a small swipe).

Special weaknesses

• Besides its own and some other eReader formats, this app only reads HTML, .rtf, and .txt files, and it removes or simplifies formatting in the process. In my test, images were stored but not viewable in the reader. The $30 eBook Studio software with which you can convert files to palmDoc format is outdated and has limited and rather clunky options for compiling eBooks from source files.
• eReader's lack of support for common office file formats makes it unsuitable for business use.
• eReader provides no way to move files to and from your PC/Mac.
• There's no way to edit titles or other metadata (author, date) about the files in your eReader library.

Evernote

Version 1.5, Free Home Page

Special strengths

• Evernote is a multifunction content manager, capable of storing documents as well as text notes. In addition, Evernote can work with the iPhone or desktop computer to take photo, video, or voice notes. Further, it provides a browser "clipper" that lets you capture web pages (or portions of them) to your Evernote store. You can also email documents to add them to Evernote.
• In addition to the Evernote iPhone application, Evernote provides a desktop application for both Mac OS X and Windows, as well as similar functionality on the Evernote website (when you log in). The desktop application and website let you do rich-text editing of notes, and even web pages. All three apps let you add and edit text notes to any kind of document.
• Evernote supports full-text search for PDF, Word, Excel, HTML, and other kinds of documents. In addition to identifying files with search terms in them, the web and desktop versions navigate and display the terms at their locations in the documents. (The iPhone version also displays search terms in HTML files, but has no way to navigate to them.)
• With Evernote, you can access a wide variety of attributes for the files in your collection, including: Information on modification and creation dates, attachments, source of note, and "To Do" information. All of these attributes can be included with search terms, tags, and notebook names as filters for searches on your document store. Such "smart" searches can be stored for reuse.
• Evernote is very good for reading most HTML files, since it rewraps them to fit the display. Using the desktop application, you can further customize the display of HTML and text files by changing text fonts and sizes.

Special weaknesses

• Evernote is one of the few iPhone apps in this category that does not support landscape as well as portrait mode.
• Evernote's support for PDF viewing is weak. When opening one on the iPhone, Evernote doesn't download and display it automatically. Instead, it shows a small PDF icon that you must press to initiate the download. Once downloaded, Evernote provides no navigation tools or other assistance, so actually reading PDFs is all but impossible.
• Evernote does not provide a way to add bookmarks to documents, nor does it return you to the document--and the location in the document--when you reopen the application.

Other notes

• To use Evernote, you must set up a password-protected account at the Evernote website. Accounts are free up to 40 MB per month of storage, and there are $5/month and $45/month subscriptions as well.
• With Evernote, users organize documents into "notebooks." This can only be done via the web or desktop interfaces. Although you can't set up "sub-notebooks," Evernote emphasizes the use of tags, which you can use as an organizing tool. You can add and apply tags in all three versions of Evernote.
• In setting up notebooks, you can specify "local" notebooks, which are accessible only on your desktop computer, as well as "public" notebooks, which contain documents you can share over the web. The default is "synchronized" notebooks.

Instapaper

Version 1.2, $9.99 (Free version also available) Home Page

Special strengths

• Excellent readability, since web content is reformatted to a text display on the iPhone.
• Extremely easy and effective bookmarklet for adding content.
• Introduced innovative "tilt-scrolling" feature, soon adopted by FileMagnet, which lets you scroll a document without touching the screen.
• When viewing on the iPhone, you can toggle between the original "web" view, and the reformatted "text" view.
• Instapaper is an excellent tool for gathering web content for later viewing, and its ability to save just portions of a page is very helpful.
• The Pro version remembers where you left off reading and returns you there by default.

Special weaknesses

• No search feature.
• Only supports HTML and text files.
• Follows hyperlinks, but frustratingly, can't add web content for later reading from the iPhone itself. Also, the application exits Instapaper when following a link.
• Files can be manually added if they are located on a web server, but only from the web version of your Instapaper store not from the iPhone application.
• Can't categorize, tag, or otherwise organize articles, either on the iPhone or on the Instapaper website.
• Instapaper can't handle articles that are published in multiple "pages," which is the norm on commercial websites nowadays. Each page has to be bookmarked separately. I tried bookmarking the "print" view of an article on Information Week, but Instapaper couldn't access it later. (This isn't true of all such "print" views, however.)
• Instapaper does not provide a way to add bookmarks to documents.

Other notes

• Instapaper requires registration at the Instapaper website, which is the repository for notes you collect from the web. Instapaper is designed to easily save web pages, or snippets of text from them, for later reading.
• A $9.99 Pro version is available which adds some useful features such as "tilt scrolling," remembering where you left off reading, and a few others.

iSilo

Version 1.20, $9.99

Special strengths

• Nice integrated web browsing, though it's unfortunate you can't save documents you browse to.
• Full-text search.
• Conversion from web pages to iSilo format (Palm format) works extremely well in most cases. If the HTML is not well formed or uses "clever" CSS tricks for formatting, the result is not so good. When the HTML result is good, the files are extremely readable.
• From a converted web page, iSilo easily lets you navigate to other linked pages, displaying them in a likewise quite readable format. (Again, it's not clear why iSilo can't save these other pages directly.)
• iSilo attempts to build a table of contents from the page's HTML structure. It loads these into the document's Bookmarks menu.
• iSilo documents can have much richer elements than other eReaders reviewed here, including support for tables, images, linked sections, and others.
• iSiloX, the desktop tool for converting HTML files to iSilo format, does very well when handling well formatted and structured HTML. It did a remarkably good job, for example, with a long Word document that was opened in Open Office and then saved as HTML. I was impressed that the conversion preserved the formatting of tabular data in the file. The conversion also resulted in a useful set of bookmarks for the document's table of contents.

Special weaknesses

• Navigation and access to options is confusing. In many cases, the options either don't work or are too difficult to use. For example, the option to change a document's font face doesn't work. In another case, the option to enable auto-scrolling must be activated by navigating to another screen; when you return to the document, any click on the screen deactivates auto-scroll, and you must return to the option screen. Even worse, it's impossible to activate both auto-scroll and full-screen view at the same time, since each activation returns you to do the document view, and each access to the options view turns off the other option.
• In general, too many useful options are hidden in submenu screens.
• The application provides no useful navigation tools.
• iSilo utilizes too many non-standard user interface methods that are therefore nonintuitive. As a result, too often I had to resort either to reading the manual or (more often) consulting the company's online support forum. For example, the function to delete files is "hidden" as a popup menu accessible only if you hold your finger on a document's icon in document view. Once you know this, it works fine, but this means there's an unnecessary learning curve and with it additional user support.
• Loading one long document converted from a PDF file consistently froze my iPhone, requiring a reboot.

Readdle

Version 1.0.5, $14.99

Special strengths

• Supports a variety of native office document and image formats, as well as PalmDoc format.
• Has a well integrated web browser from which you can bookmark and/or save documents from the web, including web pages.
• Remembers where you left off reading
• Provides a nifty slider for navigation within documents, as well as a good bookmarking tool. Files can be navigated with a click or double-click at top or bottom of the display.
• Supports "full screen" reading mode.
• Documents can be organized into folders and into subfolders, both within your Readdle Storage area and on the device. You can also move files into any of the folders on your iPhone.

Special weaknesses

• Readdle lacks support for RTF (despite what they say), RTFD, web archives, and iWork document formats.
• Unfortunately, Readdle can't save web documents that you link to from within one of your saved documents only when you manually switch to its integrated browser. This is an oversight that hopefully will be fixed in a future release.
• No search capabilities.
• To rename your documents or folders, you must visit your Readdle Storage area online.

Other notes

• Readdle provides a desktop application (Mac OS X only) for uploading content to Readdle's server, or files can be uploaded with a web browser. You can also email documents to your Readdle account to add them to your library. Content stored on the Readdle server is password-protected.
• The Readdle iPhone app synchs with your Readdle storage, and files can be read remotely or downloaded for offline reading. Note that the synchronization isn't really that, since changes made in one repository aren't automatically made in the other. For example, deleting a document on your iPhone won't delete it from your online library.
• Users can register for a free account, which is limited in storage and has some other restrictions. An "optimum" service is $5 a month.

Stanza

Version 1.5, Free iPhone app, beta Desktop app Home Page

Special strengths

• Integrated search.
• User can group documents within the iPhone app and easily add downloaded files to them.
• User can increase or decrease font size, adjust color, font. Also customize background color, margins, justification of text. In addition, Stanza provides various other customization preferences, including navigation and display options.
• The application tries to automatically add chapter information derived from the text, but gives the user no way to change them. However, it does let users add bookmarks to the documents.
• Stanza's navigation mechanisms are terrific. Besides the chapter and/or bookmark options, Stanza has a slider that's particularly useful for moving within large documents. Navigation from page to page is similar to eReader just a tap on the left or right side of the display slides pages into view.
• Stanza has a great online library of content available for download. Besides free books available ubiquitously these days for eReaders, Stanza's library includes content from newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, BBC, and Wired. These are all nicely formatted and very readable on the iPhone.
• Remembers where you left off reading, and even returns you by default to the last document you had open.
• Version 1.5 introduces some cool visual features that let users add custom images to their books and then displays them in a Cover flow view (when you switch to landscape mode).

Special weaknesses

• Stanza's support for standard office document formats is very limited. Its desktop software claims to read Amazon Kindle, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDF formats, but in my extensive testing of HTML, RTF, Word, and PDF, Stanza failed to format the content in any reasonable way. Most documents had such badly garbled page elements (headings, line breaks, lists, vertical white space, paragraph breaks) that they were unreadable when transferred to an iPhone.
• Besides page formatting, Stanza strips all documents of all character formatting (font size, color, style), tabular content, and images.
• Stanza provides no mechanism for transferring content from the iPhone back to your computer.
• I was frustrated that although Stanza offers the option of viewing text in left-justified format, all the documents I transferred showed up full-justified. This happened even when I specified left-justification on the Stanza desktop app.

Other notes

• Stanza relies on a desktop application (currently in beta development) that can be used to open supported files and transfer them wirelessly to the iPhone. The app supports both Mac OS X and Windows. Lexcycle currently plans to charge "a small fee" for the software once released.

I recently decided it was time to look again at the state-of-the-art in eBook reader hardware. It seems like I've waited forever for a company to design one I could really use in place of the traditional paper-filled parallelepiped. I first got excited by the possibility while implementing the PDF format for a magazine on CD-ROM back in 1995. "Wow!," I thought, "Whoever wrestles PDF onto a small electronic device is going to make a mint!"

Of course, PDF turned out to be not particularly well suited to small viewing screens, since publishers would have to make a special layout for the PDF version. And so, years went by, with talk of E-Ink, electrowetting, electronic paper, and other exotic technologies appearing to be on the verge of practicality.

What most of the would-be designers of eBook readers have seemingly failed to grasp, however, is that to replace paper books, eBooks must be nearly as light and portable as a paperback. They must work without cords, and be compatible companions to one's daily trip to the little boy's room. (I've honestly never met a woman who reads in the john, but it seems nearly all men do.) They must be able to accompany you to the beach, the pool, or the mountains. I'd really like something I could read while holding it in one hand, like I do a paperback. I don't want a reader that will break the bank, either. And most of all, an eBook reader needs to be comfortable to use in bed or in your favorite armchair.

Even today, with devices shrinking towards the ideal size and weight, nearly all fail to meet my needs for one reason or another. Quite surprisingly, one device has in fact replaced books for me, and it's not one I ever thought would or could. Because I had bought the device for another purpose entirely, this eBook reader has actually cost me nothing whatsoever.

This article covers five eBook reader devices, including two that are full-fledged personal computers serving as an eBook reader by way of third-party software, and another that is a multifunction "smart phone" with eBook reader capabilities. All five devices have strongly positive characteristics, and two of of them possess the full range that would allow them to serve as portable eBook readers for organizations that need access to technical and policy documentation. Even though I personally need a reader that's useful for novels and such, I'm evaluating these based on their utility as devices for storing and reading technical and other documentation rather than literature, each of which have quite different requirements for eBook reading. The five devices reviewed are:

1. Eee PC 901
2. Iliad
3. iPhone / iPod Touch
4. Kindle
5. Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium

Of these five devices, the one that emerged as the runaway winner for both literature and documentation--much to my surprise--is Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch. The iPhone's small display, it turns out, is plenty big for comfortable reading, and its form factor make it the ideal eBook reader I've been looking for. Given its numerous other capabilities besides eBook reading, the iPhone / iPod Touch is an obvious choice. Among its virtues are its

• Ability to manage all the relevant native-format files an organization is likely to produce,
• Instantaneous availability,
• Easy navigation,
• Wide variety of eBook reader software,
• Simple and powerful connectivity,
• Integrated web browser and mail client,
• Bright screen,
• Excellent readability, and
• Advanced security.

In addition to its use as an eBook reader, the iPhone has many other enterprise uses, not the least of which are its built-in cellular phone, Bluetooth receiver, GPS, and synchronized email. The iPhone also has excellent support for Windows users and can be centrally managed by an IT organization to enforce configuration and security standards.

For personnel who require a highly portable, full-featured PC, the Eee PC is an excellent choice. Given its very reasonable price, this device is an engineering marvel:

• Tiny, yet with a decent-sized keyboard,
• External controls for essentials like screen resolution and brightness,
• Built-in state-of-the-art Wi-Fi and Bluetooth,
• Ethernet port and 3 USB 2.0 hubs,
• Video camera and microphone.

With dedicated eBook reading software such as MobiPocket installed on the Eee PC's Windows XP operating system, this micro-laptop can serve users well as an eBook Reader. The only downside is the eBook reader software's lack of support for native document formats, which must be converted to the MobiPocket format (and many cannot be so converted). For users who do not need the resources of a full-blown PC, the iPhone or iPod Touch would be a better solution.

The Iliad's primary virtue is its wonderfully readable e-Ink text display, and it also has a good, portable form factor and hardware navigation controls. The Iliad also allows users to set a PIN number to protect content stored on it. Beyond those positive characteristics, there's not much to recommend the Iliad as an eBook reader for use in storing and accessing documents other than literature. And the price one has to pay for this one-trick pony, literature-only reader is far too high, in my opinion.

The Amazon Kindle is an impressive dedicated eBook Reader. The device's

• Reading software,
• Navigation ease,
• Annotation support,
• Searchability,
• Readability,
• Rapid start-up time,
and
• Form factor

are all among the strongest in the group. However, the Kindle falls down in its support for the kinds of document formats most organizations will be using and in not providing some means of securing access to content stored on it. The Kindle does not accept USB "sticks," either, so the possibility of storing sensitive documents externally is limited to Amazon's online Kindle service. Unfortunately, in my testing, that service was not always available, so in emergency situations I would not want to rely on it (for now, at least). Like the Iliad, the Kindle serves no purpose other than as an eBook reader, and as such its price seems quite high.

The Samsung micro-laptop gets excellent scores for search, document-format support, ease of adding documents, bookmarking, networking, and eBook navigation. However, all of these scores reflect attributes of the top-notch MobiPocket reader software, as well as its accompanying Creator software, which does a good job at converting common office-type files to HTML and/or Mobi format. Unfortunately, the Samsung hardware, combined with its reliance on the underlying Windows XP operating system, make this a poor choice as a portable eBook reader. The device is very slow to start up, has a very tiny and hard-to-use keyboard, and offers navigation options that aren't suitable for the onscreen software. The Samsung supports touch control, but the display targets that one must interact with to navigate are much too small. The same problem holds for the device's wand, which requires a very steady hand and precise accuracy to reliably trigger onscreen controls. The device's external keypad is horrible and requires far too much effort for an emergency operation. Using a portable keyboard is probably not a practical alternative, either, since it requires the user to have access to a table and chair to enter data or navigate the Samsung. Finally, when not plugged in to an electrical outlet, the display's screen is so dim that I had to bring out a magnifying glass in order to navigate. I won't even mention here how ridiculously expensive the Samsung is, since it can also be used (*wink* *wink*) as a portable PC.

The summary table below presents a matrix of the various attributes used for this review. Items in light green indicate the basic criteria were met, and items in the darker gradient green indicate that the device excelled in fulfilling that particular requirement. White cells are those where the given reader failed to meet a requirement. Following the summary table are detailed tables for each of the five devices, with my review notes organized into Pros and Cons for each.

Functions/Usability Matrix

Device Characteristics	Iliad ($699)	Kindle ($359)	Samsung w/ MobiPocket ($1,299)	iPhone ($199) iPod Touch ($299)	EeePC w/ MobiPocket ($599)
Supports native formats including images
Can organize documents into folders
Is password protected or supports encryption
Enables full-text search
Documents can be easily transferred from a computer
Bookmarks can be added within files
Documents can have a table of contents
Provides both portrait and landscape modes
Support web hyperlinks
Can browse and download files from the web
Font faces and sizes can be customized
Accessing and navigating content is easy
Documents are easy to read
Hardware design is well suited to reading
Has easy connectivity to local networks, or supports USB
Provides speedy access in emergencies
Has good hardware navigation (pen, keypad, touch screen, other controls)

Eee PC 901
(with MobiPocket Reader Software)

Pros

Cons

Nice design very small, but with relatively large keyboard. Bright screen, and device includes external brightness controls to change it. Networking upgrades that make this device very easy to connect: Built-in Bluetooth, and the latest, fastest 802.11n wireless receiver. Standard Windows XP security features, including support for enterprise-grade standards. Very quick to boot up (about 30 seconds). Device has plenty of hardware ports, including 3 USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, external display, and memory card. The device's trackpad is a commonly used alternative to the mouse, and this one works similarly to others. Device has some surprisingly advanced features for its size and price, such as a built-in video camera, microphone, and high-quality and audio output ports that support 5-1 speaker configurations. Besides wireless connectivity, I could use Ethernet to add this computer to my network, and I could also use a USB thumb drive. I had no trouble connecting to my wireless network or to my Mac's Bluetooth service for file sharing (etc.) Given its impressive and wide-ranging functionality, the Eee PC's price (about $600 retail) makes it a great value.

Despite the larger keyboard, I still found that it required quite a bit of practice to use efficiently... especially if you're frequently switching from a regular-sized keyboard. In the toolbox of busy geeks, it's important that the tools don't fight with each other all the time, which they tend to do if they are all activated the same way. Somewhat slow to boot down. Using the Eee PC requires navigating through the full-blown Windows XP or Vista interface, which is way overkill for an eBook reader. Despite the bright screen, high resolution, and large keyboard, these versions of Windows are more difficult to use than the iPhone's interface or that of dedicated readers. In addition, the EeePC doesn't come with any eBook reader software built-in. For the purposes of this review, I downloaded and installed the MobiPocket Reader, which is a very good option for Windows users. The EeePC has no built-in Wand or Touch-Screen capability.

Irex Iliad

Pros

Cons

The text display on the Iliad is excellent in normal indoor lighting. (I haven't yet tried it outdoors on a sunny day.) The Iliad provides a wand for use in navigation, and I found that it works quite well (once I was able to locate the "real" one... the case includes a backup that's inactive). Besides the wand, the Iliad has external navigation controls that are reasonably intuitive. The device remembers where you left off reading a particular book. The Iliad can be configured to display text in landscape as well as portrait mode. The page navigation tools work well and are quite simple. The Iliad supports use of a PIN number to protect the device. I set one up, and this works well. iRex uses an embedded Linux operating system for the Iliad, and provides an extensive site for developers who want to help develop the software. The Iliad's hardware is well designed. Its size is small enough, and its viewing screen generous enough to make a pleasant eBook reader for novels and other nontechnical works of fiction and nonfiction.

The Iliad is very slow to start up. I would prefer a touch navigation system or easy-to-use keypad rather than (or in addition to ) the wand. Navigation can be very confusing without reading the manual. Iliad relies on a variety of unlabeled icons and unnamed buttons, few of which are immediately intuitive to use. Iliad is very slow in responding to movement from page to page during this session certainly not useful for anyone who was working in an emergency situation. The Iliad can be configured to display documents page-by-page or as a continuous page. However, in the continuous mode it doesn't provide any way of "scrolling", so it's of questionable value. I would prefer a device that supports scrolling as well as page-by-page reading. In landscape mode, the Iliad's navigation controls remain in portrait mode, which can be disconcerting. The device provides no easy, accessible way to increase or decrease font size while reading. Iliad's search function merely applies to the names of files on the device. It appears the Iliad cannot do full-text search, or otherwise search the contents of files. The search function is only accessible when you're at the folder level. You can't invoke search while reading a document. Getting around a large document with many parts can be quite cumbersome. A device like this needs to provide easy access to the document's TOC, or otherwise provide a tool to skip from chapter to chapter. The Iliad's only capability is to skip 5 pages forward or backward at a time, but the user has no way of knowing where 5 pages will take them, so it's a matter of guesswork, or you must return to the TOC and proceed from there. I suspect that the Iliad was designed primarily for reading novels, books that have no TOC and that you read sequentially from front to back. In this respect, it is not suitable to complex documents with many parts, such as the NSF COOP. The electronic paper on this device leaves a smudgy-looking "ghost" print of the previous page in many cases (e.g., when going through the network profile setup screens). This is only a minor annoyance. Setting up a wireless network profile did not work. I used the same settings as for all my network devices, including my iPod Touch. Iliad could not connect. I reentered my password and tried again, but no luck. I removed Iliad from its case and tried again, but nothing. From what I could tell by navigating through the small number of documents that come installed on the Iliad, this device's navigation system will not be useful for a large document store. Navigation is too slow, and the number of documents viewable per screen is too small. The Iliad does not support hyperlinks in PDF files, only in HTML files. From this, I assume (but haven't yet tested) that it doesn't support PDF bookmarks either. This is a serious drawback, since otherwise it is impossible to prepare a TOC for multiple documents the only option is using an Iliad folder, which, as noted previously, isn't suitable for a large number of documents. Many business and personal documents have embedded tables, charts, and images of various sizes. Most are in color, which the Iliad does not support. I had difficulty moving such a document onto the Iliad to test its display for page elements like these, but this is a concern. The 4-digit PIN supported by the Iliad is probably not sufficient to satisfy enterprise security requirements these days. Unlike the iPhone, iRex offers no enterprise-level solution for configuring and protecting the Iliad in an organizational setting. Still, the Iliad's PIN is more protection than Amazon offers for the Kindle. I tried moving documents from my computer via USB and via a USB stick to the Iliad. I couldn't get any connection going with my Mac, but I could read documents from the USB stick. To do so, I had to find the appropriate setting, however, and change it back when not using the USB stick. Further, I found no way to move documents from the stick to the Iliad. The MobiPocket reader on the Iliad is nothing like the desktop version. It has none of the additional features such as search and annotations. Apparently, the Iliad can read MobiPocket files, but that's the extent of its support. Given the device's limited functionality (it's clearly meant to be nothing more than a dedicated eBook reader), its high price ($699 retail) makes it a questionable value.

iPhone/iPod Touch

Pros

Cons

Extremely compact form factor---nothing other than a shirt pocket (or similar) required to carry it around. Bright screen, and device includes easy to use brightness controls (as well as auto-brightness) to change it. Also aiding readability are the IPhone's high resolution and font anti-aliasing. The device's touch screen controls are currently the best in the industry response is excellent, and Apple's innovative "Multitouch" technology helps avoid "missed" touches. Includes support for wireless 802.11b/g networking. The iPhone 3G also includes connectivity through Bluetooth 2.0. For security, the iPhone has the following features for enterprise use (text taken from Apple's Enterprise Use overview): Supports Cisco IPSec VPN to ensure the highest level of IP-based encryption for transmission of sensitive company information. Employees can authenticate via password, two-factor token, or digital certificate. iPhone also supports WPA2 Enterprise with 802.1X authentication � the standard for Wi-Fi network protection. IT administrators can securely manage any iPhone that contains confidential company information using remote wipe and enforced security and password policies. Instantly available from sleep mode. The boot down time is almost instantaneous, and the reboot time is about 30 seconds--the same amount of time as the EeePC. iPod Touch and iPhone can connect to computers via USB 2.0. Connecting to wireless networks for Internet and file-sharing was very easy and reliable. The iPhone has some additional advanced features, such as a built-in video camera, microphone, GPS, push Email (both POP and IMAP), and (of course) the 3G data service for telephone use. The iPhone OS, a version of Mac OS X 10.5, also includes other useful connectivity services, such as FTP and HTTP, enabling file-sharing and access through those methods. Unlike dedicated eBook readers like the Iliad, Kindle, and MobiPocket, which require that documents be converted to proprietary formats or text/HTML, the iPod can view a wide variety of documents in their native formats, including: Images (.jpg, .gif, .tiff) Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) HTML (web pages) iWork files (Keynote, Numbers, Pages) PDF Text and RTF For document viewing, the iPhone/iPod Touch supports both portrait and landscape modes. Landscape mode is activated simply by rotating the device, a technique made possible by Apple's "Accelerometer" technology. The built-in App Store is a powerful way to expand the iPhone/iPod Touch's capabilities. Many of the applications that have become available are directly relevant not only for eBook use, but for other enterprise uses. For example, a recent addition called WinAdmin lets Windows users view and run their desktop applications through the iPhone interface. In a separate report, I have reviewed and made recommendations for the following eBook reader (and related) applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch: Annotater Bookshelf Bookz Caravan DataCase eReader Evernote File Magnet Files Instapaper Mobile Finder Readdle Stanza TouchFS With its 8- or 16 GB hard drive, the iPhone/iPod Touch can serve as a USB thumb drive for loading or transferring files among an organization's computers. The iPhone/iPod Touch is the least expensive of the 5 reviewed devices. If you don't want the cellphone/GPS/video/audio features of the iPhone, the iPod Touch, starting at $299 for an 8GB hard drive, is a bargain... even compared with the Amazon Kindle, which retails for $359. If you want the cellphone and other features of the iPhone, $199 is quite low when factoring in its many uses beyond those of the typical smart-phone.

The viewing screen is small compared with dedicated eBook readers, though it's larger than other cellphones. The onscreen keyboard takes some getting used to, regardless of how thoughtfully designed it is. That said, it's far better than the tiny keyboards used on other devices like the Samsung Q1U V. The standard type size for navigation on the iPhone is a bit too large for displaying long document or folder names, and the font size for these user interface elements cannot be changed.

Amazon Kindle

Pros

Cons

The Kindle has a very good start-up experience. The "Quick Start" guide is an excellent introduction to the device's main features. I found navigation very intuitive and quite like the "silver cursor" the Kindle uses to navigate within pages. I was immediately impressed with the Kindle's ability to add notes anywhere on a page. After registering the Kindle with Amazon, a required step for using the Kindle, I emailed 3 test files to see how their conversion service works. I used the "free" option at the address llscotts@free.kindle.com, which will email them back to me at my Amazon-account email address. Sending the files to llscotts@kindle.com costs 10 cents per doc, for which fee Amazon will then load the files directly to the Kindle. I tried both methods of conversion, and received Kindle files from each within minutes. The Word conversion is very good, and preserves hyperlinks. The Kindle can follow hyperlinks to web pages and to some internal links in some (but not all) documents. Kindle search functions are excellent. My only quibble--and it's not minor--is that there's no way to search a single document. The Kindle searches all the content on the Kindle. My main concern here is the time required for a lookup. Presentation of search results is excellent. Adding bookmarks on the Kindle is childishly simple. Besides using the menu and scrollwheel device, you can click on the "dog-ear" graphic at the top of any page to add a bookmark. Pages with bookmarks show an active "dog-ear" icon. The Kindle supports several other types of annotations that could be useful. You can "Highlight" text, add "Notes" to documents, or "Clip" whole pages for permanent storage. Using the first two can be used for navigation, like bookmarks. The Kindle preserves and displays images from converted documents. The Kindle's keyboard is large enough to be quite useful far superior to devices like the Samsung, for example.

Connecting to my Mac via USB was an iffy proposition. It took several attempts to do so I'm not sure what the problem was, but certainly the connection was very slow to be established, compared to, say, a digital camera, camcorder, or USB stick. After two days of use I concluded that the USB connection was so bad as to be unusable. The device kept connecting and disconnecting every few seconds. I reset the device twice, per Amazon's instructions. The Kindle only supports a few file formats natively (Kindle (.azw), Text (.txt), and Mobi (.mobi, .prc). It can also handle mp3 and audible files. Some other formats (Word, HTML, and various image formats) can be converted to Kindle format using Amazon's online service. Documents to be converted are emailed to an account set up for a specific Kindle. Kindle has an experimental service for converting PDFs as well. The on/off switch is in a nonintuitive location Doesn't support landscape mode. The Kindle doesn't reliably support links within HTML documents, though it does support external links. The text converted from Word can be a little jarring, since it displays an abundance of unnecessary vertical white space, shifts fonts and font sizes for no apparent reason, and shifts between fully justified text and ragged text layouts. You can't change the converted documents, but it would be interesting to figure out what causes the irregularities. In addition, the conversion doesn't do well with formatting such as lists. The Kindle doesn't allow users to organize files into folders. On the Kindle Media Manager website, you can add tags to documents, but these aren't transferred to the Kindle. The Kindle's web-page access is extremely slow. After several minutes of waiting for the device to connect to http://gets.ncs.gov, Kindle reported that the server was not responding. However, when I immediately entered the URL in my computer's web browser, the site came up instantly. I tried this twice with the same results. Regarding access, several times during my test the Kindle reported that it could not connect to Amazon's Kindle server. This might suggest that the Kindle server should not our primary repository for NSF's COOP documents, though it would be useful as a backup location. Since Kindle doesn't support spreadsheet documents, I converted the critical personnel roster to HTML and sent it off for conversion. Received an email from Amazon saying the HTML file (a format they are supposed to support) could not be converted: The following attachment(s), sent at 10:17 AM on Wed, Jul 23, 2008 could not be converted and delivered to your Amazon Kindle account: * COOP - Critical Personnel Roster - April 2008.html The following document and image types are supported as attachments: Personal documents: Unprotected Microsoft Word documents (*.doc), HTML documents (*.html, *.htm), and Text documents (*.txt) Images: JPEGs (*.jpg), GIFs (*.gif), Bitmaps (*.bmp), and PNG images (*.png) If your attachment(s) is one of the above file types, please ensure the document is not password protected or encrypted. If you need further assistance, please contact customer support at 1-866-321-8851. The Kindle remembers where you left off while reading a document. The type size on the Kindle's list of documents is too large it's hard to tell which document is which when the document names are so similar. You can't adjust the font size for this screen. The Kindle's documentation says that it natively supports MobiPocket files (.mobi, .prc), but it didn't recognize two that I transferred, which were created using the MobiPocket software.

Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium
(with MobiPocket Reader Software)

Pros

Cons

The device is compact, though surprisingly heavy. The Samsung PC offers three different modes for navigating and entering data: External keyboard, a wand, and a touch screen. Unfortunately, none of them worked well for me. Standard Windows XP security features, including support for enterprise-grade standards. I had no trouble connecting to my wireless network. The Samsung has a decent array of external connectivity options: Besides wi-fi (802.11g), there's Bluetooth and Ethernet.

The display on this device is so dim I couldn't read the password screen. It's bright only when connected to a power source, even if its battery is fully charged. It has no external brightness control, and despite numerous searches (even turning it over to my teenage son, who failed, too) I couldn't locate the magic switch in Windows' control panels to change it. Eventually, I took a magnifying glass to the extremely dim screen and went through the relevant control panels for half an hour or so, but I never succeeded in changing the screen brightness so I could use the device on battery power. Since one of the selling points of this micro-laptop is supposed to be its "ultra-bright LED backlit touchscreen LCD," (what is an LED LCD, anyway?) I either had a dud, the machine was badly configured, or the task was too hard for me. I would not want to be the one who has to enter my organization's 13-character password regularly. The keyboard is too small, and having to use various shift keys is terribly cumbersome. Certainly, you wouldn't want to be doing that in case of an emergency, which is one of the scenarios for which the eBook I'm looking for is intended. The touch screen, and the Windows-OS widgets that you must navigate with, are too small to easily manipulate the interface. The Samsung has only one USB outlet, so you can't use an external keyboard and have it plugged into a PC at the same time. An external keyboard isn't practical for mobile use, anyway, since you need to have a desk or table at hand for it to be used... and they may not be handy in an emergency. Windows applications don't open with a single touch you have to "double-touch" them, which can be tricky. I located a setting that lets you specify "press once and hold" to open apps, but that was finicky, and I often ended up merely dragging the icon around. When I did succeed in getting a "launch" response, the app didn't launch directly. Instead, I got a contextual menu and had to press the item "Open" to launch the application. The Windows OS requires that both the pen and the touch interface position the cursor in the target control area precisely. Thus, hitting a control with the pen spot-on is not sufficient in many cases. Controlling windows with your finger also becomes difficult when they lie on the right edge of the screen, since the control is abutting the device's case, and your (or, well, mine anyway) finger is too big to make the necessary connection. The device couldn't connect to my Mac via USB, Bluetooth, or wi-fi, so I used a USB thumb drive to move my test documents to the Samsung. As noted in my comments on the Eee PC, the full-blown Windows OS isn't well suited to eBook reading, because its navigation paradigm is difficult to use on small screens like this. Windows doesn't come with any eBook reader software built-in. For the purposes of this review, I downloaded and installed the MobiPocket Reader, which is a very good option for Windows users. The Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium micro-laptop is the most expensive of the devices reviewed as possible eBook readers. In fact, it was almost twice as expensive as the Kindle, the second most expensive device. This computer retails for over $2,000, though Amazon has it for around $1,300. As an eBook reader, or even as a computer, it's difficult to imagine why anyone would think that price was worthwhile. Perhaps they haven't looked at the Eee PC, which has better specs, is only half the price, and is only slightly larger.

My, we've come a long way in browser choices since 2005, haven't we? It's been a very heady time for programmers who dabble in the lingua franca of the World Wide Web: HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, the Document Object Model, and XML/XSLT. Together, this collection of scripting tools, boosted by a technique with the letter-soup name "XMLHttpRequest," became known as "Ajax." Ajax spawned an avalanche of cool, useful, and powerful new web applications that are today beginning to successfully challenge traditional computer-desktop software like Microsoft Word and Excel. As good as vanguard products like Goodle's Maps, Gmail, Documents, and Calendar apps are, one only has to peek at what Apple has accomplished with its new MobileMe web apps to see how much like desktop applications web software can be in 2008.

That this overwhelming trend toward advanced, desktop-like applications has happened at all is the result of the efforts of determined developers from the Mozilla project, which rose from the ashes of Netscape's demise to create the small, light, powerful and popular Firefox browser. The activity of the Mozilla group spurred innovation from other browser makers and eventually forced a trend towards open standards that made the emergence of Ajax possible.

This article starts with a brief history of web browsers and then jumps into a look at the feature set of the four primary "modern" web browsers in 2008. The comparison of browser features begins by listing the core features that all these browsers have in common. The bulk of the article lists in detail "special features" of each browser and each browser's good and bad points, as they relate to the core browser characteristics. Following that, I present some recent data on the comparative performance of these browsers. The article concludes with recommendations I would make to organizations interested in making the switch from IE6 in 2008.

1. Web Browsers in 2008: A Brief History
2. Comparison of Browser Features
• Baseline Features
• Firefox 3.0
• Internet Explorer 7.0
• Opera 9.5
• Safari 3.1
3. Browser Performance
4. Conclusions
5. Bookmarks for Further Reading

Web Browsers in 2008: A Brief History

Comparison of Browser Features

Browser Performance

Conclusions

Bookmarks for Further Reading

One question that might pop into your head when you contemplate the fact that there are at least two dozen different software applications for Mac OS X that want to be your iTunes controller is, “So, why not just use iTunes to control iTunes?” If you’ve never used iTunes before, you might also be wondering, “What’s wrong with iTunes that makes so many people avoid using it directly?”

This is indeed a curious paradox at first blush. iTunes is the world’s most popular digital music jukebox software. It has a screaming wonderful interface that just gets better with each iteration. Its innovative design practically defines “ease of use” in this category. So, why have so many developers expended so much energy and creative imagination on redefining how we interact with it?

There isn’t just one answer to that question, but here are a few possible ones:

• Mac users are too impatient to switch applications in order to change songs. They want an application that can overlay whatever they’re currently doing, providing immediate access. Call this a variation of the “Instant gratification” impulse.
• Because the iTunes API makes building external interfaces to it so easy. You often get the impression that some iTunes controllers are their developers’ first foray into xCode and/or Cocoa programming. Call this a variation of the “Because we can” impulse.
• Because a programmer had a new idea that was too cool to pass on. Either the idea was really new, or it was building on someone else’s idea. Some of the iTunes controllers are clearly attempts to improve other ones that already exist. Call this simply the “Urge to create.”

Notice that none of these possible motives is an attempt to remedy a shortcoming in iTunes, or even to add significant functionality to the application. The only thing that comes close is the addition of tools to fetch album art from the web, or to integrate with a social music networking system like Audioscrobbler. Instead, they’re simply tools that extend the iTunes interface into every aspect of a Mac user’s workflow… making it practically ubiquitous as we work.

A couple of weeks ago, I set out to survey the market to identify all of the iTunes controllers that are currently supported. (There are still old links to some phantom controllers on MacUpdate, but I won’t tell you which.) Having found 24 of them, I clearly don’t have the time to prepare a full snapshot of each as I’ve done for other software categories recently. In order to keep this workload sane for me, I have to skinny it down to the basics–my notes, a link, price info, a version number, and a recommendation.

Of the total options, 15 are freeware. This puts a pretty high standard on any app that wants you to actually pay for its services, and 9 of them attempt to go there. Two of the shareware options are choices from the “Launcher” category… these are tools that include an iTunes controller among their many other features, so they aren’t selling themselves simply on their iTunes chops. That leaves seven that do want your money, and I was curious to see how tempted they would make me.

Of the freeware options, one is iTunes itself, which provides a fully functional mini-controller that you can keep nearby at all times. The rest run the gamut from the launcher category to minimalist menubar controller, many of which are very much alike, but a few of which show incredible breadth and ingenuity.

With so many to choose from, I still had little difficulty identifying the ones I would pick for myself, and my notes on pros and cons probably explains the choices. In everyday use right now, I use a combination of an option that isn’t even on the list and Quicksilver. The missing option is simply AppleScript. You can use AppleScript scripts to do just about anything you want to in iTunes. Many moons ago, I got a set of scripts (from Apple, I think, or from Doug’s Scripts for iTunes) and assigned keyboard shortcuts to them in iKey. Now, my fingers automatically go to:

• Cmd-Ctrl-Space to Play/Pause
• Cmd-Ctrl-Right Arrow to Play Next
• Cmd-Ctrl-Left Arrow to Play Previous
• Cmd-Ctrl-5 to Rate 5 Stars (etc.)

And that pretty much sums up the extent of what I need to do with iTunes from other apps. These are great, because they don’t launch any other app, yet magically exert my will over my music. Aside from those shortcuts, I use Quicksilver to search my iTunes library. This is quick and easy, as others have documented well in the past… Here’s Blacktree’s page describing the iTunes plugin for Quicksilver.

Outside of this, I was very impressed with a few of the shareware and freeware products and am considering incorporating them into my desktop. Here’s my short list of the creme de la creme:

1. Menuet. ($12.95 now free) Part of the appeal here is Specere’s bundling of its splendid Art Collector app for the price of the equally delightful Menuet. It’s simply the best tool for collecting and managing your album art collection I’ve yet seen.
2. You Control Tunes. (Free) Many people overlook this one because it seems like merely an invitation to buy the company’s other products. I’m no fan of You Control in general, but their free iTunes controller is simply the best all-around tool available, and it’s free. The only thing it lacks, in my opinion, is an API for developing your own skins, and a search function (a common deficiency in most of these tools). But it still has plenty of nice skins, if none that quite match the best of Synergy’s or Menuet’s.
3. ClawMenu. ($19.95) ClawMenu is a frequently overlooked star performer in the Launcher category, but its joys are many and deep. As an iTunes controller, I find ClawMenu beats most of the competition… certainly, it’s far better than the functions in the similarly priced Launchbar and the free Butler. I might not buy ClawMenu just for its iTunes abilities, but they’re definitely worth writing home about.
4. Quicksilver. (Free) Nuff said already. It’s free, so just get it and get to know it. You won’t be sorry.
5. CoverSutra. ($14.95) A beautiful, unobtrusive controller with some nice extras like Apple Remote support. It doesn’t have great iTunes integration like the others, but what really snagged me (a die-hard 45 rpm vinyl collector) was its cool Laurent Baumann-designed 45 record sleeve, an option to the default CD jewel case, for displaying song artwork.

There were two tools that I categorized as a “Maybe,” meaning I still haven’t decided whether I’d actually use them, partly because they have a fairly narrow scope in the iTunes controller world. But I think they’re both pretty cool at what they do.

1. Barquee. ($10) Barquee is the only menubar controller I’ve seen whose in-bar scroller is visually bearable. In fact, the more I live with Barquee, the more I like it. Plus, Barquee has a simple API for developing your own skins, which lets you incorporate them seamlessly into any Mac OS X theme you may be using. Plus it comes with a beginning inventory of some really nice ones. Still, it’s not something I really need.
2. Krix. (Free) Krix is less an iTunes controller than an alternative iTunes interface. Still, this open-source project is coming up with some really cool ideas, and it does one thing iTunes doesn’t: Let you browse your music files outside of the rigid structure of iTunes. Yet, it does this while still leverage meta data about the files that you’ve stored in iTunes. Pretty cool! It’s a maybe at this point, because I’ve found Krix a little too unstable for regular use.

.

Then, there are a couple of tools that are in development or in planning but aren’t really in a state that even lends itself to review at this point. But they’re worth keeping an eye on for the future:

1. Synergy Advance. ($12.95) From the developer of the classic Synergy iTunes controller, this “next generation” Synergy still has too much “planned” functionality missing to fully evaluate it.
2. Radion. (Free for now) In limbo for a long time, Radion had a lot of good ideas. The current version (1.2), if you can find it, clearly shows the lack of attention to details, but the developer recently launched a new website with a promise for a new version of Radion by the end of 2006.

Finally, it would hardly be a complete review of iTunes controllers without mentioning the many Dashboard widgets that can help you out with iTunes. There are way too many to list here—especially since I haven’t reviewed most of them lately—but my all-time favorite is Symphonic, which uses a simple search field to do more than you’d suspect. If you try Symphonic, be sure to check out the Help page, which explains all the commands you can use to fine-tune your iTunes control. The same developer has a companion widget called Harmonic that downloads song lyrics and adds them to iTunes as you play them. If you’d like a controller that can help you find and add album art to your collection, my favorite is Album Art Widget. It not only does album art, but includes controls for rating your tunes and for basic play/pause/previous/forward commands (even with keyboard shortcuts). But that’s just scratching the surface… Apple’s widget repository lists 118 widgets in the “Music” category, and most of those interact with iTunes in one way or another.

Now, without further ado, here’s the list:

Name	Pros	Cons
Barquee (Version 1.2, $10)	Nice in-menubar themes. Themes are easily customizable, and developer provides good instructions. Visually pleasing display of song info in menubar. First I’ve seen that isn’t just a bother. Part of this is because the content and style of the scroller are fully customizable. Good preference pane for setting keyboard shortcuts which cover basic controller, ratings, and volume.	Provides no functions other than play, pause, forward, and back. No ratings, search, browse, playlists, etc. No display of album art.
Butler (Version 4.1.2, Free)		Butler has many fine qualities, but its iTunes toolset is weak, especially when compared with You Control Tunes, which takes a very similar—but far more comprehensive and flexible—approach. Don’t get Butler just to control iTunes.
ByteController (Version 0.8.5, Free)	Skinnable menubar controller, a dozen or so skins provided to start Supports Growl notification Provides good assortment of keyboard shortcuts which work through Applescript	Provides no functions other than play, pause, forward, and back. No ratings, search, browse, playlists, etc.
ClawMenu (Version 2.6.3, $20)	I wish I had more time to show you the many ways you can set up ClawMenu to control iTunes. Suffice it to say you can do just about anything you’d want to in iTunes using ClawMenu, including search. ClawMenu can live in your menubar or in a separate “dock.” Any of its menus can be “torn off” and placed wherever you’d like as little tabs on your monitor. This includes a tab just for iTunes stuff. Plus, ClawMenu is infinitely skinnable, because its menus can use not only colors but images as their background.
CoverSutra (Version 1.1.6, $15)	Very nice design… beautiful to look at. Provides two basic styles for the art displays: CD jewel case, 45 rpm vinyl! You know I’m ecstatic about the latter, which is a free add-on provided by icon designer Laurent Baumann. Notification/art display is persistent and can be placed anywhere on the desktop. Provides a bezel-style controller that you can display when needed using a key shortcut or the menubar or dock icon. The controller also acts as an art display and has an action menu with access to preferences, etc. Incorporates support for last.fm Full complement of keyboard shortcuts can be configured. Optionally, CoverSutra is one of the few iTunes controllers that can use an Apple remote… cool! Optional support for Growl notifications. Uses Sparkle framework for application updates.	No access to playlists, artists, or other iTunes meta data. The only thing you can configure is a list of recently played tunes. No search feature. No support for adding artwork to your library. Somewhat expensive. No controls in the menubar itself. Can’t display artwork at full size.
GimmeSomeTune (Version 2.6, Free)	Support for hot keys Can fetch artwork Menubar icon has many functions, including ratings and iTunes controller	No indication that app is trying to fetch artwork Main window keeps disappearing when I try to drag it after making it “draggable.” Inconsistent user interface standards… e.g., Lyrics bezel stays visible and has a close button, whereas main window does not even do so if I specify that I want it to be persistent. No customization for “mini controller” other than positioning. Positioning options are too static. Too many menubar functions are nested, so it takes too much navigation to get there–especially for ratings. No search tool
iController (Version 0.5b, Free)		Basic controller functions only. Keyboard shortcuts can’t set ratings. Preferences pane wouldn’t close… kept “window-shading” Menubar scrolling and Mid-screen “flashing” options for track info are annoying and ugly. No options for controller look… just one basic set.
iMote (Version 2.2.1, Free)	Menubar with many functions Easy access to ratings, playlists “Floater” panel is easily repositioned Numerous customizations in preferences Customizable hot keys for all iTunes functions	Caused SystemUIServer to repeatedly crash Not skinnable No artwork management tools No search tool
iTunes Manager (Version 2, Free)		Scary… the app would restart iTunes playing every time I switched to it, even though I didn’t ask it to. App wouldn’t quit, and none of its window widgets would work. I had to force-quit it every time and then gave up.
Ivy (Illis) (Version 1.0 rc2, Free)	Nice “find” panel for quick searches of iTunes library Front row emulator mode is interesting. Growl integration Has a panel for artwork	Main controller doesn’t stay active in “single app” mode No tools for ratings No tool for browsing by playlist No easy way to navigate to/from artwork panel, and no way to add artwork
Krix (Version v16, Free)	Beautiful interface for browsing iTunes Browse music files outside of iTunes hierarchy. Krix magically matches up songs with artist and rating from iTunes. Cool full-screen interface option Works with Apple Remote (optionally), making Krix an alternative to FrontRow for your music collection	No search function No menubar or other persistent interface option Couldn’t get Krix to read my iTunes library directly. It’s choking either because I use a symbolic link or because the library is so big. Not sure which. Slow to launch and somewhat slow to navigate hierarchy.
Launchbar (Version 4.2 b1, $20)		I have always found Launchbar weak in comparison with Quicksilver and Butler as a “do everything” launcher, but many Mac users will swear by it. Launchbar’s iTunes abilities are especially weak and unintuitive.
Maestro (Version 1.2.3, Free)		App launched the first time with an AppleScript error warning and no window The toolbar appeared on the first launch, and I set a couple of parameters (show window, dock), but no window appeared.I quit the app, and after that could never again get it to launch (even after trashing prefs)
Menuet (with Art Collector) (Version 1.1 b2, $13 free with donation)	Many nice skins for menubar controller Highly configurable keyboard shortcuts Growl integration Art Collector has excellent tools for adding album art. Art Collector lets you search by artist Menubar has many useful functions, such as access to genres and artists Built in support for last.fm, a social music community related to Audioscrobbler Best browse features of any menubar tools… including years, genres, artists, playlists, recent, albums… Includes context browse feature, which puts the current artist and playlist at the top of the menu, so you can dig into more in those bins. Reads ID3 info and displays existing art for mp3 files.	Art Collector can’t handle songs that have a title but no artist Art Collector tended to crash. No quick search a la Ivy Couldn’t find additional “skins”, nor API for skin-making. Added 12/15/06: In reviewing some threads on Menuet in the MacThemes forum, this apparently is something that was originally planned but then dropped. I tried to get an answer from the developers about future skin-making possibilities, but never received a reply. In a preview of Menuet 2.0 that’s available on MacThemes, Menuet will apparently be able to use some Synergy skins in the next release… although the advantages of doing that seem questionable to me, since it reintroduces the Synergy problem of taking up space in your menubar.
Play MiniTunes(Version 1.2, Free)	Nice search feature… you can search by title or artist. Results show up in a separate window if there’s more than one. Controller is nice-looking and functional, though basic (volume, play, pause, back, forward) Option to display artwork in tiny window. Menubar has more options (including ratings), but is a bit inconvenient MiniTunes window stays on top even in single-app mode. (But artwork window doesn’t)	Pause function doesn’t change “play” icon to “pause” icon Limited keyboard shortcut options… no customization. No options for appearance. Main window doesn’t remember its position on relaunch.
Quicksilver (Version b51, Free)		As I mentioned in the intro, Quicksilver can do anything you want in iTunes, and it does so in beautiful style. Once you get the hang of browsing iTunes in Quicksilver, you can just let your fingers do the playing from then on. If you’d like to read more about using Quicksilver’s iTunes plugin, here’s a good article on the topic.
QuickTunes (Version 2, Free)	Menubar has many functions Easy to set up persistent window that shows artist, title, and art Configurable hot keys Some customizations for display pane Can have computer announce the next song (this was a little strange in Leopard) Menu has simple options for choosing next song in genre or by artist	No search Limited “skinning” No access to playlists in menubar Ugly control buttons for “large” floating window
Radion (Version 1.2, Free)		Free registration code available on website until version 2.0 is released Software is not in a state that can’t be reviewed. Too much legacy stuff that doesn’t work or isn’t supported.
SizzlingKeys (Version 3.0.7, $5)	Excellent keyboard shortcut management Optional floating pane with basic track info and art Nice pop-up menu w/search for playlists Nice pop-up search bezel, lets you search various aspects of your library	Floating menus for playlists and search are different look/feel… seems strange. Search menu requires click on Play button, doesn’t respond to doubleclick on selection “Floater” is visually pretty lame, few customization options Provides no alternative to keyboard shortcuts, all of which can be accomplished more elegantly with most of the other apps on this list.
Synergy Classic (Version 3.1 b2, $7)	Goo-gobs of skins. Synergy is the Firefox of iTunes controllers. Good support for customizable hot keys You can customize the information that appears in the info box as the tune changes Nice that you can specify which controls to show in the menubar (i.e., play/pause, forward, back) Optional access to playlists in menu Supports Growl as an alternative to Synergy’s floater. Supports Audioscrobbler accounts.	Limited options for customizing floater appearance (e.g., no control over color, border, shadow, bevel, font, etc) Synergy doesn’t read id3 tag to see if file contains an image No search tools Limited browse functionality (e.g., while you can select playlists, you can’t browse to individual songs in the playlists) No rating function in menu
Synergy/Advance (Version 0.4, $13)	Adds the browse features of Menuet and others, including adding ratings Also includes control of visualizer and equalizer in iTunes	Too early to judge end product A great deal of functionality is missing. Crashes in Leopard when trying to access Preferences.
TuneHound (Version 1.1, $10)	You can edit song meta data directly in TunesHound window, including artist, genre, and rating (Note: Can’t add image to window) Displays album art and has basic controller functions	Window doesn’t stay on top when switching apps (in single app mode) No skinning options, and default window is pretty ugly No keyboard shortcuts, and no control options other than the floating window
TuneX (Version 2.5, $12)	Pretty interface. Somewhat innovative design that’s similar to some Menuet skins.	Very unstable. More often than not, I had to force quit TuneX through Activity Monitor. User interface is unreliable and intrusive when it doesn’t work I wasn’t able to fully test TuneX because it stopped working so often, and then the time for the trial expired.
YouControl Tunes (Version 1.4.1, Free)	Wide variety of in-menubar control buttons Complete control over the look/feel/color/font of floating “overlay” Excellent menu tools for browsing iTunes library, including context items for artist and album “Add to favorites” menu item at top Menu also shows some meta data about song (e.g., art (if any), time, genre, year,…etc) Menu has numerous options for customizing its contents Can include rating buttons in menubar, as well as optional, customizable “ticker”	Requires registration code via email even though it’s free No keyboard shortcut customizing No album art support Rating buttons are ugly if you opt to put them in the menubar Control buttons have no API for designing new ones, and no new ones have been added in years. No search tool

Since releasing of Crystal Clear and VacuumMail earlier this year, my download traffic has overridden my .Mac account ... and twice (so far) I've had to upgrade my account to accommodate the bandwidth. I don't mind that, nor do I mind the additional traffic on the Mars Downloads pages. What I do mind is the time it takes me to keep those pages updated! In fact, it takes so long I haven't been able to keep them in sync with the new stuff I was making.

I've been a pro webmaster for, well, a long time... since 1994, in fact. So keeping a couple of simple pages updated shouldn't make me break a sweat, right? Damn right! Problem is, the Download pages started as an experiment with Apple's iWeb software last year, and iWeb and WordPress don't mix well. To help them get along, I devised a simple checklist so all I'd have to do was:

1. Generate the raw HTML from iWeb
2. Massage the HTML by
   1. Tweaking a few CSS styles,
   2. Doing a few search/replaces,
   3. Doing a bit of reformatting, and
3. Plopping the iWeb HTML in the WordPress template, and
4. Moving the iWeb graphics and other files to the server.

At least, that's how I thought it was going to go. As it turns out, the convoluted HTML and CSS code that iWeb generates invariably causes problems when running inside Mars. This means each update can turn into a 2-3 hour scavenger hunt, with each contestant (Me, Me, and Me) trying to find a lost px in a huge block of unreadable code.

So last week I vowed to find another way, and I think I have. The end solution means more work up front in generating the site to begin with, but should make it very easy to rearrange, add, or rewrite content or images on those pages.

iWeb: Lovely Siren for Mac Web Designers

The great thing about iWeb is that it's so easy to design beautiful web pages, and the process of designing beautiful pages is so much fun! In fact, even though I had decided to swear off iWeb from now on, going back to her last week just rekindled my affection. Yes, as an HTML pro, there are many missing pieces and frustrating aspects to iWeb. But as a designer, I can't help but have a good time putting designs together.

And if you use iWeb to manage your site, it's equally easy: Just make the change in iWeb and click a button to push the site out the door. iWeb follows in the footsteps of older products like NetObjects Fusion, which pioneered this kind of totally visual approach. And iWeb's HTML code may even pass w3c validation tests, because it's not using any proprietary, browser-specific junk like Microsoft does with FrontPage.

My problem is that the iWeb code cannot be updated by hand. It just can't! Paragraphs of text get split into individual spans, each with their own lengthy inline CSS styles, and even more horrifying, the page content isn't presented in any understandable order. My best guess is that the iWeb code is generated as you add content to your page. This works because most DIVs on the page have a CSS style of position:absolute, meaning they are positioned by x and y coordinates, and each has the equivalent of a PostScript "bounding box" with a known width and height. As long as you change the content from within iWeb, this model, clearly derived from printing, works, since iWeb can recalculate the width and height and x and y positions of each "box" when it regenerates the code. But just try to do that on your own.

Fuggedaboudit!

And that's the main source of my frustration. Some users have complained about the size of the graphics files iWeb produces, but honestly I think that problem was either overblown, or has been remedied with iWeb updates. The way Apple handles drop shadows that you add to images in iWeb, for example, is ingenious for its ability to retain high output quality with small file sizes. It's an approach, again, that is difficult or impossible to replicate by hand. What iWeb does is generate a JPEG file for the main image, and a separate rectangular, 24-bit PNG image for the underlying shadow. (See the two examples here.) In the HTML, iWeb makes separate DIV layers for each, and positions the shadow layer precisely under the main image so that just its edges show.

The reason this is smart is that JPEG is the most efficient format for full-color images (although iWeb could be improved by giving authors the ability to set a sliding scale of quality for those images... Apple opts for the highest possible quality), while 24-bit PNG is the only format that retains the shadow's alpha layer so it can be composited against any kind of background seamlessly. Apple could have used PNG for the entire image in order to preserve the alpha layer in the shadow (in fact, I think that's what was happening in early releases of iWeb), but that would produce real, unsustainable image bloat. 24-bit PNG files are huge compared with equivalent JPEG files, except for files like this drop shadow that are mostly transparent and consist of a single color. In this case, the 24-bit PNG shadow is actually more than 50% smaller than an equivalent JPEG file... even though it still retains that cool transparency. So iWeb is doing the most intelligent thing possible with these images from both a quality and a file-size angle: JPEG is best for the heart of the image (both in quality and file size), and 24-bit PNG is best for the shadow area (both in quality and file size).

And yet... iWeb has this totally annoying and so-far-unresolvable habit of giving the image files it generates names that are either impossible to decipher, because they bear no relation to anything on the web page, or way too long to be absorbed by human eyes. The only approach to control image naming I'm aware of is to name files in iPhoto and then bring them into iWeb. But that's just not going to fit in my workflow very well, and besides, it doesn't help when iWeb goes to name the shadow file behind that image of Crystal Clear. No, it resorts to names like "imageEffectsBelow_desktop_preview_full_cclite.png." Or if you define an area in iWeb with a gradient background (for example), you get names like "shapeimage_7.png", which don't do much for the readability of the page code.

Anyway, I don't know if I'll be able to keep away from iWeb the next time I feel a web page design coming on, but I do know I'm not going to try to use iWeb's page code on Mars anymore.

If Not iWeb, What?

My search for an alternative was frustrating as well. Without going into detail (maybe another day), let me just relate the visual HTML editors I tried and tossed aside this week:

• Dreamweaver CS3. Yep... that's right, in my opinion the spanking new version of Dreamweaver, released as part of Adobe's Creative Suite 3.0, simply sucks. And I don't say that lightly, since I have been a Dreamweaver evangelist in all of my jobs since the very first version in 1998, although I began to drift /Volumes/Files/Sites/mars/images/away from it for personal projects a couple of years ago. Talk about feature and user-interface bloat! Man, and I used to pitch Dreamweaver as a good tool for beginners! Even though I'm familiar with Dreamweaver interfaces through MX 2004, as well as with the terminology of the web, CS3's convoluted interface simply boggled my mind. The simplest tasks are impossibly hidden in a submenu somewhere or a floating palette's hidden tab, or it wasn't there at all. In any case, I certainly won't be putting in for an upgrade to CS3 in order to get Dreamweaver!
• Sandvox. I'll keep watching Sandvox, but to date (through version 1.1.2) it's struck me as less flexible than iWeb for designing sites or pages from scratch. It is developing a raw HTML capability that will come in handy for pros, but its templates are more rigid than I'd like, with elements that can't be changed in any normal way. Unlike iWeb, you can't just drag images to Sandvox and place them wherever you like... and Sandvox has none of the advanced design tools for image alignment and enhancement (iWeb now includes an image adjustment HUD like iPhoto), or for fully flexible web "parts" like rectangles (rounded or not), lines, and other shapes, or even for typographic niceties like paragraph, character, or line spacing. Heck, you can't even insert a bullet list. Sandvox works best if you want to use one of their prebuilt templates, but is just frustrating as heck otherwise. Even if you add existing HTML using a raw HTML "pagelet," you can't edit it visually within Sandvox... it sits there like an alien "other thing," even though it's just HTML.
• RapidWeaver. I actually bought a license for RapidWeaver a couple of years ago, but found it totally incomprehensible from an underlying code perspective. RapidWeaver is a close cousin of Sandvox, but a bit older and in some ways wiser one. There certainly are a lot more, and more interesting themes, plugins, and add-ons for RapidWeaver by now. But like Sandvox, it doesn't really help you with the design aspect of the web, which is what iWeb does so well.

That left Freeway Pro from Softpress, which I would have tried again except they make it so hard to get a trial version, and the old one I had already downloaded no longer works. Besides, Freeway Pro is almost as expensive as Dreamweaver. I'm not sure whether GoodPage can do visual HTML editing, because likewise I couldn't get the software to run again after having exhausted the first trial last fall. (I think I opened it twice.)

But wait! I nearly forgot... ! I also did a very interesting, though ultimately not usable, experiment with Apple's new Dashcode software, which will be officially released as part of Leopard in September (??) It's been available as a public beta since December. Dashcode is a visual IDE tool for building Dashboard widgets, but since such widgets can be nothing but HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images, they are, as I've pointed out in the past, just little web pages. That being the case, could Dashcode be used to design a web page? The answer turns out to be, "Sorta." If you want to see a quickie sample made from one of my iWeb pages, you can download it here. Just for fun, of course! No, although Dashcode is fun to use in the same way iWeb is, it's even worse when it comes to writing out HTML and CSS code you could edit later by hand. Each element from the Dashcode library becomes a "part" that a special JavaScript file sets up when the widget runs. And then there's the very practical limitation of widget size. You can use big content for your widget, but Dashcode won't let you scroll down to see it while working. It's just not meant to be used that way. Still, it was a fun experiment.

In addition, I tried the following programmers' text editors to see if they could clean up the iWeb code in any way, or make it easier to manage. None of them could help:

• Smultron. Has no particular facility with HTML, although it does have a web-page preview that works well unless you have a bunch of images that aren't located where Smultron can see them. This can be fixed by adding a meta tag for the base URL, but it would be nice to be able to set this up as part of the project definition. Still, Smultron remains a favorite for general programming since it offers great syntax coloring options, code folding, tabbed windows, and split views. Its syntax smarts aren't so good on cross-language files, though, as is typical with web code: HTML with CSS and JavaScript, or PHP with HTML etc.
• TextMate. This is probably the best of the lot for HTML, because it has a terrific built-in web preview and is enjoyable to use. But it's not exactly easy to troubleshoot HTML in TextMate, nor is it a good place to think about refactoring your HTML code. TextMate does offer code-folding, split views, tabbed editing (if you're working in a project), and much more. Unfortunately, its code folding smarts could use a brain boost, since they can be foiled by inconsistent indentation.
• BBEdit and TextWrangler. I'd used BBEdit for years in working with HTML, and though it does some things extremely well (code blocking anyone?), it's incredibly boring and ugly, and has no preview facility. The best thing about BBEdit is that it can open extremely large text files, which isn't something you find in HTML very often. It's worth noting that the recent upgrade to BBEdit 8.6 requires a license upgrade, even though the only noticeable difference to someone interested in HTML editing is a new icon. TextWrangler is a popular free version of BBEdit, minus various power tools and sporting a different icon.
• Coda. This new kid on the block has a lot of promise, but at the moment it's mostly a website management tool and can't replace the best text editors available for coding. I'll be doing a more complete review of Coda later on, but for now I'll just note that it falls down in several important respects: No searching across files, no code-folding or way of tracking HTML code blocks, weak code completion and indentation functionality, no code reformatting options. It does, however, have excellent built-in previewing, amazing eye-candy, split-view editing, and a parser that tracks and presents a list of DIVs with ID references. Its full-featured CSS editor looks great, but can't see or help with inline styles.
• JEditX. I had tried this earlier and rejected it mainly because it has no support for tabbed editing or anything similar.
• Xcode 3.0. As Apple has revealed in its Leopard "sneak peek," Xcode 3.0 has some rocking new features. Although it's still not exactly designed as a tool for building web pages or editing HTML code, Xcode 3.0 has a feature that beats everything on the above list in terms of making sense of your HTML (or any other language) and determining context, code block closures, etc: Apple's calling it a "focus ribbon," but I tend to think of it as code-folding on steroids. The worst thing about using Xcode for HTML is that it has no built-in preview function (though you can launch the page in a browser). Still, like Smultron, it's free!

There are a few other text editors I've either tried before or plan to try soon, but didn't open them specifically for this project:

• Komodo Edit. The freeware version looks very good.
• SEEdit Maxi. I wasn't impressed with this when I reviewed it last year, but then, at the time I really thought I'd find a lot of HTML editors that offered basic WYSIWYG editing for things like tables and lists, so perhaps I was too hard on SEEdit.
• skEdit. Wouldn't open when I tried it last week in Leopard.
• Taco HTML Edit. I like Taco, but it feels very much like a project that got a great start and then stalled. I guess that can happen when you're not getting any income... but if Taco were actively being developed, it's appealing enough in various ways to tempt me away from Smultron or Xcode. See my recent review for more info on Taco HTML Edit.
• WebDesign. I had tried this out last year some time because of its tie-in to the terrific CSS tool StyleMaster, but didn't care for its interface. That said, WebDesign might be a good choice for beginners who don't mind actually working with the HTML code, and it's got a nice built-in preview window.
• WebScripter IDE. Has a wonderful-sounding feature set, but nothing works in Tiger as far as I could tell.
• HyperEdit. Sounds good... handles PHP and JavaScript as well as HTML.
• Eclipse (I've tried Eclipse several times in the past, but keep planning to give it another go. My main problem with Eclipse is its complex interface and way-too-complex set of preferences. Eclipse does so many things it can't keep track of context, presenting the user with irrelevant choices to what their currently doing. Still, I'm curious to see if anyone has beefed up the tool's ability to manage HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by now.)
• Aptana. This is a new open-source IDE specifically for website development.

And That Left... Photoshop?

Having exhausted all these options, I somehow remembered good old Photoshop. Then, after using it a few times to convert a design to HTML, I realized why none of the otherwise highly visual HTML tools previously mentioned (like Coda?) include the logical functionality of WYSIWYG design. Nearly all professional Mac designers use Photoshop, and that's been their tool of choice all along. I myself used Photoshop to design Mars... but I didn't use its HTML output capabilities. Instead, I made individual graphics from Photoshop designs and did the HTML by hand in BBEdit or Smultron. However, there's an easier way, which is probably what folks coming from the design side of the business are used to. So, even though I've used Photoshop frequently to design web pages and sites, I've never made the leap to thinking of Photoshop as a web design tool.

I'd even used Photoshop a few times to generate HTML, but it was for very simple pages consisting totally of sliced-up graphics. I'd never consider using Photoshop as a website maintenance tool, because then you get into the same sorts of issues you do with iWeb. That said, the HTML code you can get from Photoshop isn't as bad as you might think, and it's way better than what you get from iWeb. That's because Photoshop's output options give you some control over file naming and code handling that iWeb doesn't. As a result, when you look at the images output by Photoshop after you've set up your "slices," you know what they are by name. And you can block out the page in slices in a logical way that makes sense to you, rather than trying to figure out the logic behind iWeb's automated slicing and dicing.

As a result, what I ended up doing was recreating the iWeb Download page design in Photoshop and then putting the pieces of HTML, CSS, and images together by hand... in Xcode. iWeb still came in handy, because nothing in Photoshop makes it so easy to generate a reflection, or quickly design a page layout or a few buttons, and it's still easier to construct the text in iWeb than in Photoshop. Of course, the text bits now get copied from iWeb to TextEdit, which does a great job of generating clean HTML. iWeb and Photoshop also work well together when sharing data: Anything copied and pasted from iWeb goes into Photoshop as a vector "smart image", which can be edited in Adobe Illustrator if you have it on your system. Or you can rasterize them in Photoshop and work with them as bitmaps. The point is, you lose no quality, and even the iWeb effects get transferred.

So now that I've got the Download section set up with HTML code I can actually read, keeping it updated should be a breeze. When it's time to put up a new version of Crystal Clear (next week?), I won't have to spend an hour or two just to make a few changes to the text!

As good as this new process will be for me, what I really want is for Apple to release the new version of iWeb with all the silly bits fixed. As I said, in her current state there's no denying she is gorgeous, and I can hardly resist her when she calls, but for a sustained relationship she's far too high-maintenance for my health.

I recently completed a review of all the currently available tools that add a class of functionality that I’m calling “window tricks” to your Mac. Such tools have existed for years, but last year saw some new tools in this category, as well as more visibility thanks to an increase in the number of new Mac users who’ve migrated from Microsoft Windows.

What these users are looking for typically is some freedom from the Mac OS X user interface constraints on how you can move and resize your application windows. As new Windows users discover, Apple’s user interface guidelines prescribe very specific parts of the window that can be used to move it (usually, just the toolbar and titlebar) or to resize it (just the lower right-hand corner of resizable windows).

Longtime Mac users (me included) generally agree that these guidelines are sensible and work well. Unlike MS Windows windows, Mac OS X windows typically don’t have “chrome” on their sides that can be used for grabbing, and that’s precisely where Windows users are accustomed to resizing and moving theirs about. Apps that do have “sides,” like the Finder, can indeed be dragged about from there. But they can only be resized from the lower right.

Even so, all Mac users have likely experienced an occasion where they’ve managed to drag a window to a location from which it can neither be resized nor moved. Don’t ask me how at the moment, but believe me, I’ve been there. There are also occasions when it would be more convenient to resize a window by its lower left corner rather than the lower right. It’s not hard to imagine what kind of configuration I’m talking about there. And in these circumstances, it’s no doubt crossed your mind that it would be sure nice to have some way to grab that freakin’ window and move it without having to do a major dance, reshuffling other components of your desktop in order to make that one simple change.

So, those two are the foundation of Window Tricks, but there are a variety of others that have nothing to do with Windows switchers or with occasional yearnings by longtime Mac users. These are tricks that some creative Mac developer has dreamed up because he or she thought it would be cool. And by the way, here I’m using the term “Mac developer” very broadly. By way of heredity, the current Mac is a blend of two branches of the Apple tree: There’s the classic Mac OS, as it evolved after Steve Jobs left the company in 1985, and there’s the NeXT operating system, which Steve’s new company developed in the late 1980’s. Several of the coolest Window Tricks derive from the NeXT branch of the tree, as do the developers who have brought them back to life in Mac OS X. Here’s a complete list of the Window Tricks enabled by the entire group of apps I’ve tested:

1. Moving windows
2. Resizing windows
3. Speeding up scrolling
4. Enabling alternative scrolling:
• Edge scrolling
• Drag scrolling
• Keypad scrolling
5. Enabling tear-off menus/submenus
6. Enabling a pop-up main menu
7. Adding screen magnetics (snapping windows to a grid)
8. Flipping windows around, enabling input on their “back”
9. Making windows stay “in front” of others
10. Adjusting window transparency
11. Changing window zoom
12. Altering window/mouse focus behavior

Some of these enhancements (e.g., scrolling, transparency) are ones I had adopted many months ago, but I had been undecided about which tool to use for moving and resizing windows, and for enabling tear-off menus and pop-up menus. That leaves the tricks 7, 8, 9, 11, and 12, none of which are compelling or useful enough to influence my choice, but are still cool enough to take note of.

Since I’ve already done the reviews of most of these and discussed the others in the context of those reviews, I’m not going to repeat the findings here. Rather, the following table links to each review (as well as to the software’s home page) and shows which Window Trick(s) each software provides. Finally, the table also indicates the ones I’m using, ones I recommend possibly for others, and the cost (if any) of each.

Armed with this secret Mac Magic, I’m sure you’ll be able to go out and conjure up some really cool enhancements for your Mac, if you haven’t already done so.

A few notes about this table:

1. The “Review” link will load the review very quickly within this page. You can return to this article by clicking on the Return icon () near the top of the page. The link indicated with a ⤴ character will load the review in a separate window or tab.
2. The check mark indicates software I recommend for its purpose.
3. The green cells show which software I personally use for each Window Tricks category.
4. The column “Custom?” marks those apps that can customize their behavior for individual applications on your system, an important attribute in this kind of trickery.
5. The “Active?” column marks applications that have been updated in the last 12 months.
6. The “Source?” column marks apps that are available as open source code, usually providing an xCode project and all of its files and structure.

There are definitely some life decisions that you should think twice before revisiting. I’m talking things like your marriage, your decision to have kids, your choice of college, your upcoming vacation plans… maybe your car and house. But honestly, don’t politicians make too much of clinging to decisions they made that turn out to be wrong? And don’t some of them place way too high a value on consistency over a long period of time in one’s personal values and beliefs? Is that “fortitude” or “stupidity”? Heck, as Joni Mitchell once pointed out, “Life is for learning.” If you acknowledge that learning changes you by adding new ideas and insights, then individuals who never change their mind about things aren’t particularly good role models for an advanced society… are they?

Astute readers of this page are probably starting to wonder where the hell I’m going with this topic. “Is this an article about PIM software, or not?” Well, it’s actually highly relevant, because one type of decision we make quite often nowadays should be easily reversed. If it isn’t, we’ve made the wrong choice and should change our minds immediately. I’m talking about one’s choice of software applications.

Decisions about software should never be forever, but all too often people act as if they are, or must be. From my perspective on Mars, I can’t imagine why anyone would think it makes sense to cling to old software decisions. How can it make sense, when software is evolving at a more rapid rate than nearly any other human endeavor? Suppose I decide in 2006 that iTunes is the best digital jukebox ever, and that’s that. Then, 3 years from now, Google comes up with a startlingly new approach to managing digital assets that is so obvious and wonderful that it’s hard to cling to the idea that iTunes is better.

If I care about using the best (which I do), I’d better be prepared to try Google’s new software without regret that I invested so heavily in iTunes over the years. Fortunately, iTunes is the kind of software that lets me take advantage of its features without locking me in to them. Given my overall philosophy about software, portability of content and meta data is a pretty important feature in whatever I decide to use. This is actually one of my objections to Windows and the Microsoft way, which is to tie users to their software through proprietary formats that only Microsoft controls.

As a frequent, self-appointed technology consultant within my organization, I always make decisionmakers consider how they will be able to extract themselves from their software decision if it turns out to have been the wrong choice. My view is that in today’s software market, you have to be prepared to make software choices quickly, or risk never making a decision at all as the feature set and universe of software products rapidly shifts. But you have to be prepared to jump ship just as quickly. It’s telling, I think, that the decisionmakers who are least willing to consider jumping ship are those locked firmly into a Microsoft environment. Somehow, these folks feel that if only they could buy all their software from Microsoft—for everything from routers and storage to email and desktop—all their problems would be solved. How can they not see that with each decision to commit another chunk of their organization’s IT infrastructure to one company’s “DNA,” they further restrict their flexibility to make quick decisions, all but ceding their decisionmaking power to that other company. Anybody remember the Star Trek episodes about the Borg? Seriously, though, it’s very much like that if you let a software Borg get too close to you.

It’s ironic that so many “technology experts” think of Apple as the company that locks users in with proprietary hooks, when Apple has never been the source of such danger at all. Yes, Apple’s hardware is proprietary, but think about it: If you want to extract your data from a computer, what form does the data take? Hardware? Of course not… it’s the software, stupid!

The danger of lock-in isn’t from hardware, it’s from software. Since Mac OS X hit the scene 5 1/2 years ago, Apple has been delivering a platform built on open source, standards-based software. Even when they come up with a proprietary file format, they will shortly reveal easy ways of getting your data into and out of that format. I’m not saying Apple has never been stupid about this, but their stupidity about formats is the exception rather than the rule. As a pure software company, Microsoft’s business model is built on secret, proprietary formats that hook in to secret code in Windows, closing the Windows environment and locking users into an apparently velvet prison.

I didn’t mean to digress onto Microsoft (yet again), but my point is that one of the main reasons I use Mac OS X drives a lot of my software decisions: I don’t want to get stuck. I want to be able to migrate freely to a new software application if the features and benefits are compelling enough, and I don’t want worries about how I’ll migrate my data to be a show-stopper.

With this in mind, I’ve been eyeing the market for personal information management (PIM) software on Mac OS X for a couple of years now. I’ve felt a little like a honey bee, alighting briefly on this software package, then moving on to another, and another, all the while sampling a dozen more. The tool I’m currently using has been my “flower” for the longest period so far: DevonThink Pro.

Though far from perfect, it’s the best tool I’ve yet found, with the most flexibility for getting data into and out of its data store. DevonThink Pro covers the widest range of data types, and encompasses a large universe of possible uses and usage scenarios. However, it took me quite awhile to get comfortable with DevonThink, and even now I continue to discover better ways of working with it. And because of a few glaring limitations, as well as my general Software Addict’s mindset, I continue to sample the competition.

This article is not about DevonThink Pro, although I’ll share a few thoughts along the way. Rather, it’s intended to be an ongoing repository of my observations about software products that overlap with DevonThink as I try them out. Given time constraints, these are not complete reviews of the various products, but rather they simply document my quickly written notes on pros and cons during the course of my evaluations. Because new versions of software often overcome limitations in earlier versions (but, as self-evident as this may be, it’s not always true), it wouldn’t be fair to set these notes in stone forever. For any products that have enough “pros” to make me want to return and sample new releases down the road, I intend to revise the entries as the products evolve.

One of these days, I’ll hopefully find the “perfect” product and can close the door on this category of software for awhile. But in the meantime, I’m keeping the door wide open and welcome any newcomers that look interesting and aren’t outrageously expensive. Here is my current list of required features for a PIM product:

• Flexible import and export of data in as many file formats as possible
• Excellent support for HTML formatting and/or conversion, since it’s the final resting place for all my writing nowadays
• Thorough, robust integration with Mac OS X application services, so I can interact with the application from whatever work I’m doing.
• Top-notch search interface for quickly locating my data.
• Flexible user interface for handling data of varying formats and complexity
• Support for smart folders as well as for deep nesting of tags, categories, and folders as aids for organizing data
• Support for to-do lists
• Support for regular word-processing tasks.
• Support for tabular presentation of data and/or spreadsheet-style organization
• Persistent utility for taking notes without having to open up the main application interface.
• Integration with WebKit to enable easy import of web content.
• Robust support for the PDF file format.
• Easy integration of image data, as well as audio and video files.
• Intuitive, easily understood navigation and toolbar functions.
• Excellent, extensive support for contextual menu functions.
• Full accessibility of functions to AppleScript and Automator to enable workflow automation.

One last introductory note… The products in this category overlap with those in the “note pad” or “sticky notes” category, but though I am reviewing those products too, I don’t intend to include those reviews here. In my ideal PIM application, there would be no need for a separate “note pad” or “sticky notes” category, because such functionality would be built into the PIM tool. But nothing that’s come along to date quite fulfills that vision, unfortunately.

The following list has links to the mini-reviews that are included in the article at a given time (in alphabetical order). Products that I intend to keep watching for awhile are designated with checkmarks ().

1. Daily vX
2. Formation
3. iData
4. Journler
5. KIT
6. Mori
7. Soho Notes
8. TopXNotes
9. Yojimbo

At the end of the article, I’m keeping a list of the software products that are in my “review queue,” and notes about these will be added here as they’re done. OK… enough jabbering… On with the show!

Daily vX

Daily vX is a powerful and, in many ways, impressive personal information manager. Unique among the applications reviewed thus far, Daily is actually a FileMaker application that comes with a FileMaker 8.x runtime. (Note: I know extremely little about FileMaker, and didn’t investigate its capabilities for this review… I simply looked at Daily as a Mac OS X application and assessed its usability and functionality in my usual quirky way.) Apparently, it’s hard to hide this fact, because even if you look at the usual “About” page for Daily, all you get is “About” the FileMaker runtime. (Oh well…) Daily is a product of the German company INtex Publishing, which appears to use FileMaker as the foundation for all their applications.

Daily’s reliance on FileMaker is probably a strength for certain kinds of applications, but in general I found it to be a weakness. FileMaker gives Daily’s data entry system a consistency that would probably be great in a business environment, where you want all records of a given type to be entered the same way. However, for a PIM, it’s not that helpful, because it’s too inflexible to handle a wide variety of information types that you may want to enter. Reflecting its data structure, Daily entries have a certain set of fields for each entry. You can add more text fields, but you can’t, for example, add more than one image or other media file. For that matter, the main text field can’t contain images, and it lacks a number of formatting options that many consider essential for a PIM—for example, bullet or numbered lists.

It’s important to note that if you already have some FileMaker expertise, Daily’s structure becomes much less rigid. That’s because you can use the FrameMaker runtime INtex provides to develop new layouts and data models for your documents. In this case, you can add new fields of various types, rearrange them in the view, and more. As powerful as this capability is, however, it’s hard to imagine busy professionals finding the time to develop their own entry types, or even modifying the layout of existing ones.

Apparently, Daily’s underlying architecture also precludes it from leveraging standard Cocoa-framework goodies like application services, resizable interface elements, customizable toolbars, access to standard text styles, and so on. The interface itself is attractive, but eventually you realize it’s just one big window, and nothing within it can be changed. Reviewing Daily was an adventure unlike the others here, because it’s not a Carbon app… and it’s not Cocoa, either. This is a big drawback if you’re expecting users to take some comfort from standard interface components. Heck, you don’t even get aqua scrollbars!

Now, all of that said, Daily can do a heckuva lot with what it gives you. It has numerous ways to export your information (though there are drawbacks there as well, as I note in the table) and offers sorting and other database-related options that most PIMs don’t. Taken on its own, without the context of the Mac OS X desktop, I found Daily’s interface to be quite usable. In fact, if this were a web application instead of a Mac OS X desktop application, my expectations would be quite different, and Daily more impressive. Daily makes it relatively easy to bring content into its fields (though not by drag/drop) and has some useful hooks into other Apple applications (e.g., Mail, Address Book, Safari, iCal, etc.) At $19, Daily is pretty inexpensive, and if you have fairly rigid content types to manage, which you’d like to be able to export easily to HTML, spreadsheets, or other formats, you should check it out.

Formation

My summary impression of Formation is that it was developed from the point of view that users would spend most of their time in Formation, using the file system and Formation tools to browse to content, or to directly cut/paste content into it. Formation assumes that content is mostly created within its boundaries, and it’s exceedingly difficult to get external content into Formation without manually cutting and pasting. Formation is not taking advantage of the numerous facilities in Mac OS X for letting users put content in other applications without having to switch to them first. In this, it simply fails to provide what I consider core functionality: Use of application services, Applescript, contextual menus, Automator actions, PDF workflows, and other tools to make it easy to get content here and there the way that makes the most sense in a given situation.

iData

iData’s database orientation initially intrigued me, but after spending some time with it, I came to feel it was a serious limitation for the ordinary day-to-day business of managing personal information. Perhaps the iData developers have other audiences in mind—for example, companies who build specialized databases of content for their employees—but that’s not exactly how the software positions itself in its marketing. I found iData 2.0’s user interface to be confusing and inconsistent, and I had a hard time even getting started without reading some of the help pages. Some readers will be saying to themselves, “Well, why shouldn’t you read the Help pages?” Perfectly reasonable question if you think a user should have to read the manual before starting to use a software application. However, I think making users reach for the manual to do the most simple tasks is a failure of the interface design. We know how to build software that’s intuitive for most newcomers nowadays, but it requires thinking like a user rather than as a programmer or data-modeler. The iData interface is too much a reflection of the underlying application architecture, and not enough a reflection of how users think about the tasks they want it to do.

I notice that the developer has an early beta of iData 3.0 available now… I might give it another try, although it’s pretty far down on my list at the moment.

Journler

Journler is an incredible bargain, and my hat is off to the developer who’s building this marvelous package. Journler is a cornucopia of Cocoa and Mac OS X goodies, and it takes advantage of every opportunity Apple’s engineers are providing to extend Mac software to the latest and greatest possibilities. Just a quick look at the full range of Journler’s capabilities makes me drool about its potential, and I’m in awe of the programmer’s skills and his generosity in making this hard work available for free. Here’s a concise list from the Journler website:

• Entries by date and folder
• Standard word processing capabilities
• Record audio and video entries
• iLife integration: iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie and Safari bookmarks
• Spotlight support
• AppleScript support
• Edit entries in tabs or multiple windows
• Inline media viewing: audio-video, images, pdfs, websites and archives, Address Book records
• Import and export entries: text, rich text, pdf, word, html, webarchive
• Print and export a single entry, collections of entries, or any dated range of entries
• Integrated iWeb, emailing and Address Book
• iPod notes export
• Integrated blogging: Blogger.com, LiveJournal and MetaWeblog API systems
• Relevance ranked searching and live filtering
• Elegant and easy to use, powerful with well documented features
• Unicode compliant, write in any language
• 256 bit AES encryption

At this time, however, my testing found Journler’s performance a bit spotty, and implementation of some of the features—in particular, the multimedia features—a bit weak. I took other notes indicating that Journler’s use of some Mac OS X technologies needs a bit more work. All in all, this is a marvelous product with loads of potential and numerous great ideas, and I’m definitely going to keep an eye on it. Journler already has a large, satisfied user base, and if you don’t have money to spend and need a tool for managing personal information, it’s a no-brainer to give Journler a try.

KIT

KIT is one of the least expensive PIM tools in this list, and its latest version clearly follows Yojimbo, Mori, and other applications into the new, Tiger application style—of which I’ve grown quite fond. As such, KIT is very attractive and easy to use. Its feature set is as complete as the others in the list of those I’ve given a “checkmark”, but there are just too many missteps in the user interface and unstable behavior in basic functions like search, to recommend. Like the others in my “checkmark” category, KIT is also missing a number of features I consider essential in a PIM: Ability to accommodate structured tabular data (i.e., spreadsheet-type views), support for nested folders, and support for smart folders that are smart enough to handle custom data types.

If it were just a matter of missing features, however, I’d give KIT a checkmark and keep it on the “promising” list for future reviews. Based on my experience with the current release, however, it appears that KIT has a ways to go merely to get basic application stability and user interface consistency under control, before tackling more complex functionality. My list of pros and cons will explain the specifics. KIT gets above-average reviews from sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker, so clearly it has its fans… Price may well be a factor here, since you get quite a bit for $25. However, I also noticed some comments corroborating my experience with KIT’s search feature, and I do tend to have very high expectations in Mac software. (By the way, KIT stands for “Keep It Together.”)

Mori

Mori is a very attractive, powerful PIM tool that handles most of the tasks I threw at it well. It falls flat in one critical area, and after determining this I didn’t spend too much time exploring further. 

It turns out that Mori is very weak at processing HTML. It can’t display HTML without converting to to RTFD, thereby losing formatting and some critical styles. Try importing a web page, and Mori will probably import only the text content. There was one plugin that sounded good, but it didn’t work when I tried it.

Speaking of plugins, Mori is one of the few tools here that has a robust plugin model. In fact, it already has a fairly large—and growing—repository of plugins written by the developer and third party users. If Mori fixes the HTML problem and addresses my needs for a “quick note” functionality, it would definitely be on my short list of PIM candidates.

Soho Notes

Soho Notes is really the only one of the commercial products I’ve tried that’s tempted me to part with my dough. It comes reasonably close to DevonThink in the import/export department, and it has one killer feature that I first remember seeing in Yojimbo: A persistent “dock” that appears as a tab on the edge of your screen, which can accept drag/drop input from other sources. In addition to this, Soho Notes’ dock has other uses, most notably, an amazing clipboard utility that makes it super easy to see and re-use your clipboard history. Soho Notes also has a menubar tool called “FlashNote” that serves as a search tool for your notes. Unfortunately, ever since I first saw this in Sticky Brain (the predecessor to Soho Notes), I’ve expected that FlashNote would be a tool to let me create notes, not just search them. I’m always disappointed to discover I can’t do this. That’s one feature from Yojimbo that I really want in my ultimate PIM tool.  

Another thing I like from Soho Notes, which DevonThink doesn’t address yet, is the ability to use Soho Notes as a blogging tool. This makes perfect sense, since at the moment I have to switch from DevonThink to another tool (Ecto) when it’s time to publish my notes. Unfortunately, Soho Notes doesn’t have support for WordPress blogs in the current release, so I can’t make use of that feature.

All in all, Soho Notes is an impressive software package with a great icon. At the moment, it has too many limitations that would create more work for me if I were to switch from DevonThink Pro. You can read the gory details in the accompanying table, but suffice it to say that Soho Notes is sufficiently interesting at the moment that I plan to continue trying out new releases for awhile.

 

TopXNotes

I don’t know the history of TopXNotes, but it looks like it comes from the class of Mac apps that were originally built for Mac OS 9 and achieved some success on that platform but have made an incomplete and awkward transition to Mac OS X. In the case of TopXNotes, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would choose it given the broad array of modern Mac OS X apps that do all that it does, plus more—and often for quite a bit less money. Not only is TopXNotes ugly (heck, it still uses unaliased text and doesn’t even offer aliasing as an option!), but the workflow it envisages doesn’t make much sense on the modern Macintosh. By this, I mean that TopXNotes offers no way to make a note without bringing its window to the front and either typing directly, or pasting something from the clipboard. Yet, Mac OS X now has tools that let customers create notes without ever leaving the app they’re copying from (called Services), or developers have built applications that let you take a note in a tiny window that doesn’t take over from the app you’re working in when the idea for a note hits you. In other words, PIM apps need to be able to take notes while in the background, so you can keep working without interrupting your train of thought. Another basic failing of TopXNotes is the absence of a search interface. This is software that apparently expects you’ll search by browsing, which might have been fine 10 years ago, but we all have information stores that simply require a robust search tool nowadays.

Clearly, TopXNotes considers itself a PIM-type application rather than a Stickies replacement. Yet it doesn’t offer as much as some less-expensive Stickies replacements do. For example, Edgies is only $10, but it has a better interface (unobtrusive notes hide on the edges of your screen), app services, a notes organizer with search, and much more. Compare that with $30 for TopXNotes and you’ll understand my disappointment. It’s also disturbing that TopXNotes went from being $25 in June, when I first downloaded it, to $30 in October when a new version (1.2) was released. Version 1.2 did have some useful enhancements, but only ones that tried to catch it up with things that more modern tools like Yojimbo and Soho Notes offer for the same price. I think the developer considers TopXNotes’ “QuickNotes” feature innovative, but it’s quite lame in comparison with similar features from these other tools. For one thing, it only shows notes you put in a certain “Quick Notes” category… and then, only 10 of them. It doesn’t let you create notes or search through them.

The fundamental problem with TopXNotes, in my view, is that it’s based on the older Carbon framework, which doesn’t have access to features that become automatic and second-nature in more modern apps. For example, TopXNotes won’t let you store images, PDF files, web pages, movies, or other document types. Is this because it doesn’t have access to the Cocoa framework? I’m not expert enough in Cocoa vs. Carbon to say for sure, but I suspect it does. Further, because of its Carbon heritage, the interface is unintuitive to users of more modern Mac applications. More detailed observations are in my notes on pros and cons (below.)

Yojimbo

When I first saw Yojimbo at the beginning of 2006, I thought, “Wow! This is It!” But once I took a closer look, I realized that Yojimbo’s charms are fairly shallow at this time. It isn’t really suited to heavy-duty research use, or for more than very light note-taking. The primary drawback is Yojimbo’s lack of support for nested folders. Without them, you kind of have to give up on the folder concept entirely, since otherwise the navigation panel quickly becomes too crowded to be useful. Further, like Soho Notes, Yojimbo comes with a set of default folders that you can’t change, and these defaults use up a good deal of your navigation real estate right off the bat.

Without those limitations, Yojimbo would be very tempting. It’s got the best persistent utility for taking notes of any tool here in its “Shelf”, which is like a tab that attaches to one edge of your screen. I wish Yojimbo would implement the Soho Notes behavior for this, however, so that one could take notes without the full application residing in memory. Soho Notes handles this by utilizing a helper application with a much smaller memory footprint, which starts up when you login, but at the moment it’s the only application with such a feature. What I really want is some combination of DevonThink, Soho Notes, and Yojimbo, and perhaps one of these days such a beast will be born. Until then, I’ll keep looking… and Yojimbo is one of the apps I’ll keep an eye on.

Addendum: PIMs in Waiting

Other applications in this category (some may actually be “notepad” apps, but I won’t know for sure until I try them out) that are in my “review queue” include:

1. I Know & Manage⤴
2. EagleFiler⤴
3. Nifty Box⤴
4. JournalX⤴
5. Container⤴
6. myNotes⤴ (Removed 4/20/07. myNotes is a notepad app rather than a PIM.)
7. KIT⤴ (Added review 3/17/07)
8. VoodooPad 3.0⤴ (I bought a license for VoodooPad once upon a time, but it wasn’t up to my needs at the time. I’ve put it back on the list because of a new version that came out a few months back.)
9. TopXNotes⤴ (Added review 1/15/07)
10. Daily vX Journal⤴ Review added 12/06/06.
11. Hot Plan⤴ (Removed 12/5/06. Hot Plan is a personal organizer (”to-do list”) tool, not a PIM.)
12. MacJournal 4.0
13. Circus Ponies NoteBook⤴ (Added to list 11/8)
14. Dossier⤴ (Added to list 11/8)
15. viJournal (Added to list 11/14)
16. Snippet Mind⤴ (Added 11/28/06)
17. Scrivener (Added 12/18/06)
18. Tinderbox⤴ (Added 1/4/07)
19. Chandler⤴ (Added 1/9/07) Note: Chandler is also a Personal Organizer, so it’s on that list as well.
20. TAO⤴ (Added 1/23/07)
21. Scrap Book⤴ (Added 2/16/07)
22. NoteTaker⤴ (Added 2/16/07)
23. Notae⤴ (Added 2/16/07)
24. Caboodle⤴ (Added 3/3/07)

The following are apps I’ve reviewed already and marked with a “checkmark”, which have released new versions that I plan to try out:

1. Yojimbo 1.4 (latest version released 1/9/07)
2. Mori 1.5.1 (latest version released 1/23/07)
3. Journler 2.5 (beta version available… to be released late March 2007)

As I look at these and others that may come along, I’ll update this article with my notes.

It’s a common myth in the Windows world that Mac users have to make do with only one software title for every 10 that run on Windows. The myth arises from the teeny-tiny or nonexistent retail space afforded to Mac software in the computer stores where Windows users shop. However, the reality is far from that perception. Prior to the emergence of Mac OS X, Mac users did commonly face slim pickings in many software categories, but times have changed dramatically, and nowadays many software categories present so many choices for Mac users that the situation is downright uncomfortable. I certainly feel that way at times!

One of these days, I’m going to do a study of the comparative availability of software titles between Mac OS X and Windows, and my going-in assumption will be that users have an equivalent or greater degree of choice on the Mac platform today in categories such as

• personal information management
• personal organizers
• graphic design tools
• 3D design and animation tools
• image management tools
• project management
• word processing tools
• programmers text editors
• Music mixing and editing tools
• News aggregators (RSS/podcast readers), and
• many others.

Notice that not all of the categories I’m listing are in the realm of creative arts.

However, one category that’s still under-served, in my view, is the original killer app, the good-old spreadsheet. I haven’t researched the Windows market for spreadsheet software, so perhaps the same dilemma affects those guys, too. Undoubtedly, the underwhelming selection of spreadsheets for Mac OS X results directly from the influence of Microsoft Office, and what is probably its best component, Microsoft Excel.

As Mac history buffs know, Excel was a hit on the Mac market long before it won the battle for supremacy on IBM PCs. Because Excel was entrenched on the Mac OS from early on, there never really was much competition in this space, as there was on DOS and Windows. Combine that with Microsoft’s success in convincing everybody who makes software purchases for organizations, large and small, that installing Microsoft Office was a requisite for business success in the electronic age, and Microsoft hasn’t even had to breathe hard to stay way out in front of the spreadsheet race on Mac OS X.

However, this situation doesn’t mean that spreadsheet users are being optimally served. In fact, coming to Excel from Mars makes its shortcomings quite clear. How is it that Mac users put up with an application that is so over-built, unintuitive, uninspired in design, and backwards technologically? Is it because Excel really is the quintessential spreadsheet experience? Is it just that we’re used to it? Or is it because we have no better options?

The answer, I believe, is mostly the second question, with heavy support from the third.

Even after Apple came along and gave Mac users a presentation package that runs rings around PowerPoint and a word-processor that makes Microsoft Word look like the illogical, incomprehensible morass of functions that it is, how many Mac users have turned off PowerPoint and Word and put Keynote and Pages in their place? I suspect the answer is “Not many.” Mac users may like to think they are more discerning than Windows folk, but most are also just as scared of switching software packages, in my experience. Most Mac users will take whatever their employer gives them for the key business processes of writing words and making bullet lists. Heck, some may even try Keynote and Pages and return to the hellhole of PowerPoint and Word because they are more comfortable there.

However, if you’re the least bit adventurous where software is concerned, I challenge you to get a copy of the $79 iWork, install it, and then delete Word and PowerPoint from your system for 2 weeks. I guarantee you will not miss those Microsoft crown jewels one bit at the end of that time. I’ve been using both for over 2 years now, and no one in my organization has the slightest idea that I’m not using the “corporate standard” for word processing and presentations. These babies not only make preparing your documents much easier and more enjoyable, but they can read and write native Microsoft formats better than I thought possible. (Pages is particularly compatible… I always convert my Keynote presentations to high-quality, interactive QuickTime movies and use those if I have to present something on a Windows machine.)

All of this is prelude to my complaint that Apple hasn’t completed building its iWork triumvirate to replace Microsoft Office. iWork also seems incomplete to the thousands (millions?) of people who had relied on the company’s now dog-eared, orphaned gem, AppleWorks, as an Office stand-in at home. In other words, finding a spreadsheet that’s a solid replacement for Excel is still a challenge on Mac OS X.

This isn’t to say that it’s impossible, mind you. As you’ll see in a moment, there are several alternatives out there that can stand in for Excel just dandy, if you are just patiently determined to use something that’s not from Microsoft. Some of these feel obliged to don all of Excel’s familiar, flawed complexity and its stilted user interface, to make you feel at home. However, you gain nothing in functionality or usability, and you have to put up with quite a bit of pokiness and interface weirdness.

There is also one spreadsheet package for Mac OS X that I would happily continue using if it weren’t so expensive. In its previous incarnation, RagTime had a free-for-personal-use option called RagTime Solo, which I have used for a couple of years. However, RagTime 5, on which Solo is based, had grown out-dated by 2006, and I found recent releases of Excel to be more responsive and usable. Therefore, I was thrilled when the RagTime 6 beta program began early last year. RagTime 6 is a marvelous suite of business software offering numerous significant improvements over the previous edition. I was happy to migrate to RagTime 6, content that my spreadsheeting needs were being well attended to. Imagine my dismay, then, to discover last fall that RagTime 6 wouldn’t continue a free version, and that I’d have to spend 249 Euros (what’s that… about $325?) to “upgrade” from Solo. This, I was assured, was a terrific bargain, since the commercial rate for RagTime 6 is 850 Euros ($1,100)!

*sigh* No matter how good I think RagTime is, I’m just not willing to spend that much money for a spreadsheet package… Sorry! And the German company that makes RagTime is making the same mistake other software vendors do: You have to buy the whole “suite” or nothing, even if, like me, you only use one of its many components.

RagTime 6.0 performs all of the tricks I require from a modern spreadsheet application. This list is quite specific to my needs, and no doubt leaves off key functions that other users find invaluable, but here are my “must-have” requirements (in no particular order):

1. Read and write Excel files from the last 5 years without requiring anything more than superficial cleanup (e.g., font replacements).
2. Support column and row hiding.
3. Support multiple sheets per workbook.
4. Unlimited rows and columns.
5. Support antialiased fonts.
6. Allow drag-and-drop reordering of columns and rows.
7. Support styles or an equivalent method for styling cells with frequently used attributes.
8. One-click support for optimizing row and column width.
9. Handle copy/paste from and to delimited ASCII data files.
10. Export to generic HTML as well as to Excel and delimited ASCII files.
11. Speedy sorting of rows and columns by the usual range of options.
12. Easy to use math functions for adding formulas to cells.
13. Flexible copy/paste of cells, allowing visual formats, data formats, and formulas to be selected independently.
14. Easy to use typograpic and visual style management, together with simple, intuitive manipulation of cell data types.
15. Simple, intuitive controls for merging/splitting cells and for adding/deleting rows and columns.
16. Simple, intelligent controls for printing spreadsheets.
17. Simple, intuitive controls for merging sheets into workbooks and for extracting sheets from them.
18. Simple, intelligent controls for charting selected data ranges.
19. Intelligent handling of text and image content in data cells, minimizing user work in incorporating these data types into a workbook.
20. Tools to easily change orientation of data: rows to columns, or vice versa.

See? “I don’t want much,” as Ringo Starr once said. But like Ringo, my tests have confirmed that the holy grail of Mac spreadsheets in 2007 just “don’t come easy.” In fact, as of March, I must report that it don’t come at all!

Still, it do come close. (Gotta stop talking in rock-lyric vernacular already!)

I have, in fact, purchased a license this month for Mesa, which I’ve come to enjoy using quite a lot after learning a few of its quirky moves. And there is a new Mac spreadsheet package that is evolving swiftly toward my holy grail: With each new release since its debut last summer, Tables gets steadily better, and I’m hoping it’ll give Mesa a run for my affection in the near future. Of course, looming over the horizon, which we originally thought we’d reach in January at Macworld, is Apple’s rumored “Numbers” or “Sheets” or whatever they’re going to call the planned addition to iWork. Apple’s rumored spreadsheet application is probably giving the developer of Tables an ulcer, since I suspect it’s going to look and feel a lot like Tables does. Unfortunately, the U.K. developer of Mesa seems to be sitting this little contest out. My biggest gripe with Mesa is that the company hasn’t released a significant update in more than 2 years, even while both Apple and the Tables developer have been feverishly fixing up their entries in the “Great Mac Spreadsheet Sweepstakes” of 2007. Mesa is a terrific little software product, and I only hope it doesn’t get left behind in the race.

I also looked at a few semi-spreadsheet products that just don’t do enough of my list to qualify for this competition. They are, nevertheless, sufficiently interesting to list here, and those whose needs for formatted data are even less rigorous than mine may find them of value:

• TableX. Can read and write delimited ASCII data files. Best for use in read-only mode, though… not particularly easy to use for data entry. Totally unique metal-window interface, but you have to pay $20 for the privilege.
• XTabulator. Also limited to reading and writing delimited text files, but better at data entry and with a more flexible interface. That said, you can’t easily use the $10 XTabulator for textual data.
• nView. nView is very similar to XTabulator, with the same limitations. It’s donationware, though, and you can make one contribution good for any of the developer’s many interesting Mac OS X utilities. XTabulator has a much better icon, though.

Then there’s an application that may in fact be a very good spreadsheet package, but I’ll never know because I don’t have the patience to review another application from this particular vendor. Please don’t take that statement as a sign of disrespect for the vendor’s Mac applications… I just happen to find Intex’s FileMaker-centric software uncomfortable to use. They all have this really quirky interface, an artifact of their heredity as FileMaker “documents,” which require a FileMaker “runtime” that launches them. Unlike regular apps, there is no version number you can find in an “About” sheet. Instead, the “About” sheet tells you what FileMaker version you’re running. (Oh, OK… that’s relevant, I guess.) They have some of the same un-Mac-like weirdness that make certain Java applications hard to use. I reviewed the company’s journal software, Daily vX Journal, in December, and many of the problems I identified with it apply also to their List vX software. But if this doesn’t bother you, you might want to check List vX out, since at 19 Euros, it’s reasonably priced.

Finally, it’s worth noting that many word processing apps for the Mac have a native ability to construct data tables. If your needs are pretty simple, they might be all you want. For example, the little chart you’ll see in the NeoOffice review below was done in Pages using its built-in spreadsheet tool. Pages doesn’t do everything an accountant would require, but for putting together a few numbers, with maybe a few simple formulas, and then quickly charting them, it’s much faster than Excel and can produce nicer results to boot! It’s far superior to the limited table-making tool Microsoft gives you in Word, though it makes no claims to being a full-fledged spreadsheet: You wouldn’t want to ask Pages to handle a table with 1,200 rows and 50 columns. Nevertheless, Pages has surprised me with some nifty spreadsheet-like tricks. For example, you can copy a range of cells from an Excel sheet and paste it into a Pages table. As long as the Pages table has the right number of columns and rows, it’ll parse the data without blinking. Similarly, you can copy and paste any tab-delimited ASCII file into Pages and easily make a handy, sortable, chartable table. Being a word processor, Pages is great at handling text and graphics, so… it’s better than you might suspect for most of the things I see people turning to Excel for.

Besides Pages, there’s the previously mentioned AppleWorks, which, although a brilliant rethinking of the multipurpose office application, is probably a software dead-end now. Besides, its spreadsheet chops were always iffy, I found. For example, it immediately crashed when trying to open my test Excel file. Finally, a software suite called Papyrus has a table-making component, but in my testing it didn’t appear to be nearly as robust as the one in Pages and was more like that in Microsoft Word. Unlike AppleWorks, Papyrus couldn’t import or export Excel files of any kind, though it could handle delimited ASCII files. At $100, Papyrus probably has other virtues, but I only tested its spreadsheeting skills.

That left the following list of candidates from which I chose Mesa. As confirmation of the paucity of choice in spreadsheets, I have no candidates waiting in a review queue this time, as I have in previous roundups. Mesa is it, until Tables matures some more, or Apple releases a “Numbers” that does for spreadsheets on Mac OS X what Pages and Keynote have done for word processing and presentations. (Note that I’m giving Tables a checkmark, signifying that even though I can’t use it today, it’s close enough to my requirements that I plan to keep an eye on its progress.)

1. Mariner Calc
2. Mesa
3. NeoOffice
4. OpenOffice
5. Tables
6. ThinkFree Calc

MarinerCalc

I really hate to say anything bad about Mariner, a Mac software development company that’s been faithfully supplying Mac users with Microsoft-alternative office tools for many years now. Some of their newer products look quite good in fact, but Mariner Calc is not one of their newer products. Designed back in 1998 for the classic Mac OS, it has never really been redesigned for Mac OS X. In fact, from what I can tell, Calc hasn’t been significantly changed since July 2001, when Calc 5.0 was released. Since then, there have been point releases (which, unlike the Mac OS X ones, have really been just that), bringing Calc up to 5.5 today.

Calc looks and feels like a 5-year-old product, one that Mariner has essentially abandoned. Since Calc is probably the most widely used and best-known Mac spreadsheet app outside of Excel, I kept downloading new releases as Mariner offered them, in hopes that Calc would begin to incorporate some of Mac OS X’s enhanced user interface capabilities, but it always looked the same each year… and now I know why. The best thing I could find to say about it was that it opened my test Excel file successfully. Call me picky, but I have been living in Mac OS X since October 2001 when OS X 10.1 came out, and I have no desire to go back to OS 9, thanks very much. Heck, even Microsoft has done a better job updating their old Excel code for Apple’s new operating system, and Calc, sadly, just looks like a pale imitation product. Besides, isn’t anybody else getting tired of the Calc lady, who has been peering up at us from the cover of the Mariner Calc box for 5 years? Mariner, let me give you a word of advice: She ain’t no Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima or Mr. Clean.

Mesa

Mesa is a refreshing spreadsheet to use after putting up with Excel for so long. It doesn’t meet all of my requirements, though the main one it misses is the ability to export sheets as HTML. I can work around that, but have asked the company to make it a priority for the next release. Spreaking of which, I found the U.K. company that makes Mesa to be very responsive and forthcoming about the questions I emailed them in January. As I mentioned earlier, I hope they take the work of updating Mesa seriously, or its quirkiness and slightly outdated feel will not keep pace with upcoming competitors. That said, after using it for a few weeks recently, I have found Mesa to be the best all-around spreadsheet (outside of RagTime 6) now available for Mac OS X, and I recently ponied up the $34 for a full license.

If you decide to try Mesa, approach it with a fresh eye. This is not an Excel clone, as so many of the other products I reviewed are. The Mesa developers have actually attempted to rethink a number of the activities one engages in while spreadsheeting, and they’ve made the process remarkably easy. But you do have to learn how Mesa does things occasionally, rather than expecting Mesa to behave the way you’re accustomed. My advice is, if you can’t find a ready function and begin to think Mesa can’t do a given thing, open up the handy Help file and take a look. Chances are, it can. In some cases, Mesa’s “ways” are actually ingenious improvements, but all too often they’re just clumsy missteps that the company should invest time in fixing. (I believe my list of Pros and Cons give examples of both, so I won’t go into detail here.)

Like the best Mac software nowadays, Mesa utilizes an “Inspector” window where you perform a lot of the contextual work that older software stuffs into menus and toolbars. Mesa’s inspector looks a little dated now, but it’s definitely a welcome step. Also welcome is Mesa’s blissfully simple four-pane Preferences window. Between the Inspector and Preferences, Mesa is a good example of how software developers can simplify a user’s work in adapting to and using spreadsheet software, and it stands in stark contrast to all of the Excel clones in this regard.

One of the most complicated aspects of Mesa, though an example of delightfully simple complexity, is the way the company has utilized the standard Cocoa toolbar. Instead of providing one set of choices on a single sheet (as virtually all other apps I’ve seen do), Mesa lets you make the toolbar as robust and personalized as possible, giving access to any function that you see in Mesa’s menus. The simplest way I can describe this is that when you select “Customize Toolbar,” Mesa first says, “Which menu do you want to add functions from?” You then select, say, the “Edit” menu, and Mesa presents a set of icons representing those functions. You can make this as complicated as you like, by repeatedly digging into Mesa’s “icon chest” and adding items you use frequently to the toolbar. It’s true that all of the Excel clones have very robust toolbar-customization functions, but I just find the Cocoa toolbar’s easy access, customizability (large icons/small icons/text only, etc), and easy disposability a huge improvement over earlier software that envisions toolbars as row upon row of tiny, 16-pixel-square graphics whose purpose you must either guess or ignore.

NeoOffice

I am probably the biggest proponent of open source software solutions in my agency, and I’m constantly at odds with the IT department over the issue. In my writings as well, no one would ever find anything but delight and joy in open source software development and the programming heroes who make it happen. Even so, as a Mac user I can’t say anything nice about NeoOffice or the project from which it sprung, OpenOffice. If the goal of this project is to provide a realistic, practical, cost-effective alternative to Microsoft’s Office monopoly, it’s going about it ass-backwards, in my humble opinion.

There… now that I’ve insulted all the hard-working, well-meaning, highly intelligent programmers who’ve been toiling for years to make OpenOffice a reality, let me briefly explain why I think their project is fatally flawed. Here’s a simple, one sentence statement of the problem: You can’t beat Microsoft Office by pretending to be Microsoft Office. There are two assumptions this team has made that I happen to disagree with:

1. First, Microsoft Office is the cadillac of office suites, and everybody loves using it. Therefore, we have to make sure our product does as much as possible just like Office.
2. Second, the Office Suite is an inevitable product of software evolution. We know this because Microsoft won the market, and Office is the standard that won.

Both of these assumptions lead directly to the path the OpenOffice movement has been following, namely: Why mess with success? If Office is what people want, we’ll give them Office… only, for free.

Un-Unh. You can’t win that way, and the reasons are long and complex and would take too many words to completely cover here. Let me try to summarize and hope this isn’t taken too literally: All software migrations are disruptive, no matter how little change is involved. They’re especially disruptive to the IT staff who has to manage the change, and it’s the IT department that will decide whether a company will switch from Microsoft Office to another product. It’s not the accountants or the CEO or the users. As long as the head of IT has a budget to defend, he or she will have no incentive to cut costs by adopting OpenOffice. The only actors that could motivate a company to switch from Microsoft Office today are strong pressure from users, strong pressure from upper management, or strong pressure from the market.

As a strong proponent of user-centric software, I naturally believe the best approach to toppling Office is to build a better mousetrap, not one that just looks like a cheap knockoff. This requires software developers to take a hard look at today’s requirements for (a) word processing, (b) number crunching, and (c) making “decks.” It’s a mistake to assume that the morass of coding that has evolved into Microsoft Office is the platform from which you should build a better experience for users. Surely we’ve learned something in the last 12 years about an organization’s needs for writing memos and reports, making lists and calculations, and making persuasive arguments in front of audiences that could yield us something better than Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

In my opinion, one of the things that’s wrong with Microsoft Office is its assumption that nobody wants to buy word processors, spreadsheet software, or presentation software a la carte. To see how flawed this assumption is, just recall that users didn’t benefit from this conglomeration one iota. It was a strategy concocted by Microsoft to win the office marketplace… and obviously, a very successful one. Clearly, once Microsoft prices its a la carte components ridiculously high, and sets a tempting price on the suite, it seems to make economic sense to buy the suite. Certainly, this is the case if there’s no one selling equivalent components at more reasonable prices. However, there’s no reason why Microsoft Excel should cost $200, if Microsoft can sell you the whole Office suite for $450. Right? Go to Microsoft’s site today, and you won’t find any incentives to buy Excel outside of the suite.

But why? Does every employee of every organization that uses Microsoft Office really use or need all of its components? What exactly do employees need in the way of a word processor in 2007? Does everyone need the same level of complexity in such products? How many of your staff did PowerPoint presentations last year? How many built a spreadsheet? If you begin to ask user-centered questions such as these, I guarantee you’ll come away with a very different set of requirements for office productivity software that looks nothing like Microsoft Office… or NeoOffice or OpenOffice or ThinkFree Office.

This is the fundamental tragedy facing those who are rooting for OpenOffice. OpenOffice isn’t like the Mozilla project, where software designers actually did some hard thinking about user requirements for a web-browser-based computing platform. From what I’ve seen, it’s an attempt to outdo Microsoft using Microsoft’s rules of engagement, and I just don’t think it’s going to advance the state of the art of office computing even if it’s successful.

Instead, take a look at what small, inexpensive software products like Mesa and Tables are doing. By taking a fresh look at the whole business of using spreadsheets, they’re moving the state of the art in the right direction. Apple has already shown one such improved approach in Pages and Keynote. NeoOffice, sadly, is not just a Microsoft Office knockoff, it’s a very bad knockoff that’s impossible to use. Sorry for the lengthy pontificating… take a look at the accompanying data on memory utilization for these products, and you’ll see one reason why they make no sense for Mac users. My test system has 4 GB of RAM, yet NeoOffice was straining my PowerMac’s capabilities after only a few minutes of use. Using ThinkFree Office had similar results, with OpenOffice not far behind. Note that since I’m expending so much hot air on a subject that really covers NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and ThinkFree Office, don’t be surprised if the writeups for the other two are much shorter. I’ll be mostly including the Pros and Cons noted during my testing.

One last word for those who may not know the difference between OpenOffice and NeoOffice. OpenOffice is the core open-source project, with heavy backing by Sun Microsystems. The OpenOffice project was very slow in providing a build that would run on Mac OS X, but eventually gave us one that will run in the Unix X-Window system, using Apple’s X11 software. The NeoOffice project is a relatively small offshoot devoted to building a native Cocoa version of OpenOffice for the Mac. Resources for NeoOffice are likewise very limited compared with Sun Microsystems and the OpenOffice core, so work on the Cocoa build is understandably slow and the resulting software buggy. I have tried numerous times to becomes friends with NeoOffice, but each time, it slaps me back down, and reminds me why the whole project has struck me as odd from the start. That said, I am very grateful that Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin initiated it, since otherwise the high-profile OpenOffice project was giving the Mac platform very short shrift. Now, at least, Mac OS X has some visibility among that developer community, and hopefully that exposure will be positive in some way.

OpenOffice

You can read all about OpenOffice and my opinion about its development in the preceding writeup on NeoOffice. The only thing I’d like to add here is that OpenOffice is frankly an insult to the Mac community. Why anyone would expect a Mac user (or any computer user) to have to fire up two applications in order to launch one is beyond me. And then, to expect Mac users to politely suffer the silly dialog-box behavior that Windows users take for granted is unreasonable. The final insult is to be expected to like software that takes 20 seconds merely to present the splash screen, followed by an unexpected but predictable recovery operation to rescue a document that didn’t appear to be in distress, with an inevitable invitation to take a few minutes to let Sun Microsystems know about the failed recovery (which was actually successful… I think). It’s nice to think that OpenOffice is actually usable on Windows or Linux, but it’s far from being so on Mac OS X. For even once the spreadsheet has been drawn (to the full width of my 23-inch monitor, natch), the software has buried my resize corner below the bottom of my viewing area, and it caused me a fair amount of frustration trying to whittle that rectangle down to a reasonable size. As if all this weren’t bad enough, every time OpenOffice attempts to communicate with me, I feel like it’s transporting me back in time to the 1990’s, when Windows was 95 or 98, and all text was square and all buttons were shaded to look faux-3D by use of a white pixel painted along the left and top sides and a black pixel along the other two. Sorry… I just can’t take OpenOffice seriously, and hopefully neither will you.

Tables

As I wrote when Tables first appeared last summer, “Any time a new spreadsheet package comes out for the Mac, it’s cause for celebration.” With its clean, modern Mac OS X look and feel, Tables was—and remains—a breath of fresh air, but at this point it’s clearly still in development, and not yet up to the task of handling heavy processing loads. The good news is that it’s in active development, with new versions coming out once a month or so. In fact, it’s the only application in this group that had an update during the course of my testing. As usual, the new version of Tables let me scratch out one or two “cons” from the list, while adding one or two new “pros.” The developer seems to understand that his app isn’t yet fully sea-worthy, because he’s made the very user-friendly decision to let your 30-day demo license renew each time he refreshes the application.

At this point, if he can fix the problem with handling large spreadsheets that I note, and make sure copy/paste operations are reliable and intelligent, I just might be willing to hand him a few bucks for his troubles. Like Mesa (and all of Apple’s iLife apps), Tables employs a handy Inspector window to help you out. Clearly understanding the best features of such tools, Tables lets you spawn multiple Inspectors if the need arises (some of Apple’s products, such as Pages, do this as well), and it understands that minimizing the screen real estate required for such helper windows is worth a programmer’s effort.

ThinkFree Calc

I had such high expectations for ThinkFree when it was first launched about 5 years ago. Here was a $50 office suite that even in its early stages was a good stand-in for Microsoft Office’s “Big Three,” and it was available simultaneously for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Not only that, but the ThinkFree developers were thinking ahead to Web 2.0 by providing a web-hosted workspace for your documents, so that they could be always available, like the Web. In a November 2002 white paper to my agency IT directors recommending that employees be permitted to use Macs as an alternative to Windows (which was loudly ignored, by the way), I wrote of ThinkFree:

ThinkFree Office is a $49.00 office productivity suite that does an excellent job of mimicking Office formats—both in reading and writing them. It comes with modules for writing, spreadsheets, and presentation that are compatible with Microsoft Office. ThinkFree only implements a subset of the Office functions, however, leaving out many advanced functions. The ThinkFree interface is almost identical to that of Microsoft Office.

So what happened to ThinkFree? I checked up on their progress periodically, but there didn’t seem to be much happening. Trying ThinkFree Calc last week, almost 5 years after the first version came out, gave me a strong, sad sense of deja vu. For a nauseatingly long tirade on why I have come to think it’s a mistake to build products like ThinkFree to compete against Microsoft Office, check out the writeup above on NeoOffice. To that, I only have to add that it’s nice to see ThinkFree is still only $49.

Flying in from Mars over the weekend when I was using Calc, a friend looked over my shoulder and wondered why in the world these silly humans choose to spend $400 or more per user to equip them with software that could be had for a tenth of the price merely by switching vendors, and I shrugged my shoulders and quipped,

“Gets me. Free thinking comes naturally to us Martians, but here a product has to make the suggestion to get attention. And even then, the idea backfires when it becomes clear that the developers themselves weren’t thinking freely when they designed their almost-free alternative. Maybe some humans are more comfortable in chains, as long as they’re expensive and come with friendly, talking paper clips…? You know, I’ve observed that it seems to be a common human trait to automatically assume that the most expensive product in a market is the best one. Watch long enough, and you’ll see it time and again.”

My Martian buddy merely shook his head sadly and walked to the kitchen for a bowl of steaming hot fudge.

Addendum: More Spreadsheet Apps?

At the time this article was originally published, it included information about every Mac OS X spreadsheet application I was aware of. Since then, readers pointed to the following two, related applications. I’ve checked them out and agree they should be covered here as well, so I’m adding them to my “review queue”:

1. FlexiSheet (Added 4/6/07)
2. Quantrix Modeler (Added 4/6/07)

I’ve been using Quicken on my Mac for over 10 years now. Quicken came free with the very first Mac I bought back in 1996, and having nothing else to compare it against, it seemed like a pretty good thing. Sure, it was buggy, and as time went by I realized it was just a pale shadow of the version Intuit was providing to its Windows customers. But it definitely was saving my wife and I time at the end of the month in paying bills and reconciling the checkbook.

By now, I’ve grown accustomed to Quicken’s face, but unlike Henry Higgins’ statement in My Fair Lady, that’s not a compliment. I hate Quicken’s face, in fact, and I detest the continued second-citizen status Quicken consigns me to in the world of personal finance. That’s not totally Intuit’s fault, but they haven’t done a good job of improving Mac users’ lot much over time. I guess I should feel lucky that I can connect online and automatically download transactions from my bank. Too bad I can’t do the same with the mutual fund company where I have my IRA money.

The worst thing about Quicken’s face is the total absence of control over all the windows that get spawned. You think the Finder is bad? Then you haven’t spent much time in Quicken! Fortunately, I use WindowShade to keep my account windows from taking over, but do you know what? Quicken can’t remember from session to session where I’ve left my windows, or in what state I left them. This means I have to spend a minute or so each time I open the damn software to rearrange all those windows. What fun! :-{

The next worst thing is the incomprehensible set of menus and toolbar items. Quicken’s interface appears to have grown like the suburbs of most U.S. cities in the last few decades—that is, totally without order, logic, or aesthetics of any sort. This is probably why I never venture far when I enter QuickenLand… Just do my checkbook, pay a few bills, update a few stock prices, and get the hell out of there.

Naturally, Quicken has no concept of the Mac OS X Cocoa framework, so all the neat little user interface utilities I use in my other Mac apps don’t work here… or they work with a jerk. Application services? Ha! Automator actions or Spotlight support? Ha Ha! Intuit has made no attempt whatsoever to keep Quicken up to date with the latest and greatest Mac OS X technologies, and if I’m a typical customer, I can understand why.

I’m so locked into Quicken that it’s almost painful contemplating my escape. Not only do I have the last 10 years of financial data locked in there, but I also spent a lot of time early on entering all my data back to the early 1980’s. Some of my investment account data go back even further than that. I know that some Mac customers have gotten free, but I also know they probably had to spend a lot of time digging themselves out. And once they were out, did they feel like Neo waking up outside the Matrix? Lord, I hope not!

So I’ve been keeping a close eye on the various personal finance packages that are available for the Mac. In the last 2 years, there have finally been a few apps that looked interesting enough to do more than just open them, take a quick look around, and leave. I’ve now tried four of them and have at least four more to go. As I finish the trials, I’ll keep this article updated on my prospects for a Quicken escape.

The first app I tried a couple of months ago was a definite reject… You can read my mini-review of Checkbook elsewhere on this blog. The next three, which I’m including in this article today, are more interesting. Thinking of picking up my belongings in Quicken and trudging over to these others doesn’t totally inspire me, but I do think it would be possible—and that’s a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. As I noted in my Checkbook writeup, there are several things that have to come together to create a truly painless transition from Quicken for me:

• Import my Quicken data, including all my accounts, categories, and other metadata. Preferably, this would involve merely importing one big .QIF file from Quicken, but may require many round-trips to export and import individual accounts.
• Handle online transactions with my bank.
• Support my historical and future investment transactions, and
• Provide a scalable financial repository with a reasonably fast interface to get things done.

Those are just the bare-bones requirements, and I’ll be happy if I can find an app that will handle just those. However, I’m really looking forward to working in an interface that acts like a Mac and isn’t afraid to show off a little.

As for the three apps I’m inaugurating this list with, I’ll have to either wait until one of them grows up enough to handle all of these requirements, or give up on one or more of them in anticipation that my monthly bill-paying exercise might be a bit more fun.

If I had to choose one of these today, it would probably be Liquid Ledger, which has the best combination of looks, usability, functionality, and Quicken compatibility. Its biggest drawback is an inability to handle investment transactions, but the company says that will be included in the next revision (due early 2007). Cha-Ching has a ways to go before it catches up to where Liquid Ledger and iBank already are. Its biggest shortcoming—it can’t import .QIF files—is due to be addressed in the next dot-release of Cha-Ching, so we’ll see how that goes. It definitely has the most innovative interface design. iBank has most of the requirements covered, though it’s quite weak at importing Quicken data, has a frustrating set of restrictions on its demo use, and produces more frustrating application behavior than I’d like—incredibly slow performance and/or application freeze/crashing. All the gory details on these three are included below, along with screenshots.

As I finish others in this category, I’ll add them to this list, in alphabetical order. Products that I especially like and intend to either adopt or keep watching for awhile are designated with checkmarks ().

1. Cha-Ching
2. iBank
3. Liquid Ledger

For the future, I have a four or five other apps in this category that I plan to try over the next weeks (months?), and if new ones show up before I actually make my escape from Quicken, I’ll add them, too. These are listed in the Addendum

Cha-Ching

Cha-Ching is still so early in its development that it’s hard to say for sure whether I’ll like it when it grows up. However, the developers clearly are trying to imbue a sense of fun into personal finance, and they’re trying to keep things simple. Too simple at the moment, unless you’re just starting your first checking account at a time when your finances are straightforward and, well, simple. Even then, if you do any electronic bill-paying, you might find it a pain that you have to enter all your transactions—incoming as well as outgoing payments—by hand. Still, for certain kinds of transactions—for example, a ledger accounting for all your personal belongings, or for a small collection of baseball cards or comic books—Cha-Ching offers some unique features that others in this category don’t, such as the ability to snap a photo of an object with iSight and attach it to your Cha-Ching entry. Hardly a core requirement, but it’s imaginative and indicative of a development team willing to think way outside the box. With its beautiful interface and tantalizingly cool features, Cha-Ching is an app I’ll definitely keep an eye on, but it can’t help free me from Quicken at the moment.

iBank

iBank was the first of these three that I tried, and I was immediately impressed with its refreshing interface. After Quicken, iBank’s rethinking of how to organize the functions of a personal finance app into a single window was a revelation. I found the software to be immediately usable, and after only a short while I was pretty comfortable navigating and working in iBank. Of all the three initially reviewed, iBank is the only one that theoretically has all the bases covered except the one (ability to download banking transactions without leaving its iterface). It can import .QIF files from Quicken, handle investment transactions, and offers some great conveniences I hadn’t even considered when contemplating a Quicken replacement. For example, with its single window iBank can provide a handy snapshot of your entire financial situation through its different panes, including the nice automatic pie chart view.

That said, iBank falls short in a couple big respects that keeps me from jumping the Quicken ship right away. First, its handling of the demo trial is not only irritating, but it hobbles the entire demo process. It’s really impossible to determine how well iBank can handle my entire data set without letting me import and work with it. Instead, iBank restricts transactions in any given account to 50… and then it announces it’s going to quit in 15 minutes. (See my notes for more on this.) Second, iBank was exceedingly slow at importing .QIF files, and tended to hang on larger ones. I had to force-quit a couple of times during the test. At a minimum, these impressions made me anxious to continue trying other solutions from my list. Yet iBank had enough virtues that if nothing better materializes, I resolved to ask the company to let me try out a less restrictive demo of the software.

LiquidLedger

I was really surprised by how much I liked LiquidLedger. In fact, until I discovered that it doesn’t yet handle investment accounts or transactions, I thought I had discovered my Quicken replacement and was ready to get out the checkbook. Liquid Ledger has the most useful interface I’ve yet encountered: Even though it doesn’t adhere to the single-window model of iBank and Cha-Ching, it’s a far cry from the one-window-for-each-account-and-everything-else-if-possible philosophy of Quicken, and the windows it does spawn make sense and add value to the experience. Its speed and accuracy at importing my entire set of Quicken data (minus the investment accounts and transactions) was astonishing, and this powerful feat alone made me realize I would eventually find a way out. Like Cha-Ching, LiquidLedger’s developers are thinking fresh about what users want in a personal finance application, and they’ve offered several unique options that go way beyond Quicken and make previously unthinkable tasks—unlike Cha-Ching, tasks whose value is immediately obvious—second nature. (I describe a couple of these in my notes.)

Unfortunately, there’s that little problem of my IRA account, stocks, mutual funds, and other investments. LiquidLedger picked up their names and categories, but that was all. I do hope the developers follow through on their plan to make that functionality a top priority for the next release, because otherwise I’d be hard-pressed to justify spending $75 for this software, which is already more than Quicken (or any of the other options I’m looking at) costs. Once I realized this functionality was missing, I decided to postpone further trials until later. That decision was helped along by the discovery that LiquidLedger’s way of keeping you from stealing its software is to make it impossible for you to save any accounts you create with the demo version. Thus, I had to throw away all I’d done when I closed LiquidLedger after my first run-through with it.

Addendum: More Personal Finance Apps To Come

Here are the applications I’ve currently got on my review list as possible Quicken replacements:

1. iCash
2. iFinance
3. Money (from Jumsoft, not Microsoft)
4. Moneydance (I’d tried this a couple of years ago, but it seems to have evolved quite a bit since then)
5. Buddi

As I look at these and others that may come along, I’ll update this article with my notes.

Review: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista - News by InformationWeek It's very gratifying to see a review like this in the "mainstream" IT press. Not that it will make any difference to the idiots who continue to keep their heads in the Windows sand. Some people simply have too much invested, both personally and professionally, to acknowledge that computing life beyond Windows is actually an improvement. Maybe someday... and at least, I think the rebellion is making some progress against the Empire these days. Articles like this are evidence that more tech writers are willing to speak their minds without fear that advertising dollars will dry up.

One of the problems I’ve had in picking a personal information management (PIM) application is the great degree of overlap among various related categories. For example, where does a “To-Do List” application end and a “Project Management” application begin? Or how about daily journal software and applications that organize your notes? And let’s don’t forget “sticky notes” applications, “shoebox” software, “scheduling” applications, “file storage” tools, and so on.

Truth is, a lot of these categories are slowly merging, and that’s part of what holds me up: Surely the ultimate convergence will be upon us soon, so just wait a little while longer. Yeah, right. The problem with this kind of logic is that convergence is a trend that never stops, and if you never dive in and pick something to help you manage information and/or get organized, you might never start.

The reason convergence keeps going is that each new software idea sparks another one. Both users and developers participate in this amazing dance, and ultimately we all end up winners. This is why I stress the importance of avoiding lock-in. Whatever you choose, try to make it one that won’t keep you from switching to another in a year or two, if the avatar horse you’ve chosen peters out before the finish line.

With that brief intro, I’m going to start a new series looking at a category of software commonly known as “Personal Organizers.” These differ from PIMs mainly in their strict focus on project management, with the humble to-do list being the foundation for all of them. In 2006, there has been a rush to market by developers wooing converts to the “Getting Things Done” approach to personal organization. GTD, as everyone seems to call it, is the brainchild of David Allen, whose website and rapidly growing “flock” come across to the unenlightened as a serious religious movement. Obviously (I think), it’s not that, but just having arrived from Mars, it looks that way to me. (Of course, zealous Mac users like me can come across that way, too, until you take a closer look.) GTD has numerous champions in the Mac world—in particular the popular 43 Folders website, which first came to my attention as a good source of information about using Quicksilver. It turns out that 43 Folders champions Quicksilver because it’s such a useful tool in helping folks adhere to the GTD Way.

Whatever you may think about David Allen and the specifics of his GTD prescription, most busy professionals today are definitely in need of help in Getting Things Done. If you find a tool or approach that helps you with that worthy goal, it’s worth adopting, and the arrival of so many innovative personal organizers will hopefully help more of us get a grip on all the to-do lists we’ve got floating around in our brain.

By way of clarification, what I refer to as Personal Information Managers (PIMs) can be thought of as a superset of applications that personal organizers fall mostly within. The PIMs have a jack-of-all-trades approach, recognizing that to-do lists are one kind of information we need to manage, but so are software serial numbers, online store receipts, web bookmarks, journal notes, blog entries, and so on. However, so far none of the PIMs I’ve tried can be used for project management as effectively as the best personal organizers. The reverse is also true.

In fact, I’m starting this series with a software package that could almost be considered a PIM, and I almost added it to that other list this evening. But ultimately, Process by Jumsoft is a Personal Organizer. Its focus is on helping you get things done, not on helping you organize all the information you have scattered around the house or office.

Besides Process, I have earlier looked at a couple of other products in this category, both of which fell pretty far short of the mark for me:

• High Priority
• Stapler

Others that I’ve tried in the past and found wanting include Burnout Menu (which is no longer “in business”), and CheckOff (which I haven’t tried in over a year). Both of these apps let you manage to-do lists in the main menubar.

I inaugurated this list with just one application, and as I finish reviewing others, I’ll add them to this list (in alphabetical order). Products that I especially like and intend to either adopt or keep watching for awhile are designated with checkmarks ().

1. Frictionless (Added 12/31/06.)
2. Process
(Added 12/12/06.)

For the future, I have a long list of additional software in this category that I plan to try over the next weeks (months?), and as with the PIM article, I’ll likely be adding more to the list as time goes on. These are listed in the Addendum

Process

Process is an impressive young application that’s already onto version 2.0 and has quite a lot to offer in the way of general project management. The user interface is particularly strong, and it embodies the kind of flexibility and user-centric thoughtfulness that thankfully is becoming the norm rather than the exception in the Mac market today. There are, however, some curious omissions and inconsistencies in implementation that kept it from sweeping me off my feet. Its price tag of $39, which makes it one of the most expensive apps in its class, probably helped moderate my enthusiasm as well. Still, it’s got enough going for it that I’ll probably keep checking for updates. My list of pros and cons explain the test results in more detail.

I’ve been intrigued by the concept of virtual desktops since encountering them in a Unix system many years ago (I think it was an SGI Irix system), and then later when I set up Linux about 5 years ago to play around with that OS firsthand. Then, a couple of years ago I saw an early build of Virtue Desktops and thought it was pretty cool. I really loved the nifty transition effects and all the desktop customization you can do with Virtue.

However, Virtue seemed pretty flaky at the time, so I looked around to see what other virtual desktop environments there were for Mac OS X. To my surprise, there were several in addition to Virtue… including some commercial implementations. After trying all the free ones (I wasn’t interested in paying for this feature, since I didn’t even know if I’d like it), I decided Virtue was the best of the bunch.

But I also decided that Virtue’s flakiness was simply adding more time to my routine rather than helping me organize my work, and I finally broke down and decided to try You Control Desktops. Now, it may be a total coincidence, but just after I installed Desktops and restarted my system, the whole OS began to flake out, and I ended up having to trash my hard drive.

Needless to say, whether that was You Desktops’ fault or just a bad hard drive kicking in, it soured me on the whole idea of virtual desktops for awhile.

Then, when Apple announced in August that one of the premier features of its forthcoming Leopard OS would be a virtual desktop system called Spaces, I thought that maybe someone would finally get this thing done right on Mac OS X. Maybe the problem has been that the implementations I’d tried just weren’t intuitive enough, or right-featured enough, to be useful to me. I even said this out loud in an article of video snippets from the WWDC keynote that I published in mid-August.

Apple’s initiative with Spaces also made me question my previous conclusion that virtual desktops were not worth the effort. If Apple is investing the energy to bring virtual desktops to “the rest of us” someone at Apple must believe that they are a user interface enhancement that will really benefit “us.”

So, I opened my mind once again to the idea of virtual desktops. As a member of the select Apple developer group, I’ve been getting the Leopard “seeds” as they’re released, and I’ve taken the opportunity to try out Spaces along with other new features of Leopard. Given my nondisclosure agreement with Apple, I’m not going to say anything about Spaces that isn’t revealed in Apple’s own presentation of it on the Leopard website. Instead, I’m going to spend a few minutes sharing my impressions of virtual desktops in general and of four other specific VD applications that are already available for Mac OS X:

• CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro
• Desktop Manager
• Virtue Desktops
• YouControl: Desktops

At the outset, I’ll confess that my note-taking for this exercise wasn’t as rigorous as usual… I didn’t test for the same set of features in each application. Unfortunately, I can’t go back now and refresh my memory for the commercial products, because their demo licenses have expired. The reason for my relatively sloppy approach probably reflects my renewed conviction, after thoroughly testing Spaces, that for most computer users, virtual desktops are a waste of time and effort. Simply put, they’re an idea whose time has passed.

That’s a pretty harsh judgment, I realize, and one likely to make a good number of fellow geeks stop reading right here. After all, some users of virtual desktops feel strongly that they are highly valuable and necessary—for them. And I suspect that’s true. Given the probability for misunderstanding when expressing an opinion on a topic like this, I want to begin by exploring why virtual desktops arose in the first place and what benefits users get (or believe they get) from them. I also want to explore the expectations users have of virtual desktops like Spaces, in the very likely event that they’ve never actually used such a system themselves.

From what I’ve read of the history of virtual desktops (VDs) and some of the discussions among those who question their value and those who defend their necessity (for links, see the Addendum), I’ve concluded that the reasons for virtual desktops can be summarized as:

1. They provide a means of dealing with “window proliferation”—that is, they provide a way for users to segregate certain windows of the same application into different compartments, to make them easier to locate and refer to.
2. They are a strategy for compartmentalizing one’s work at the computer. For users who perform several discrete tasks during a computer session that involve specific, mutually exclusive applications, VDs can provide a space for each task. In this case, having VDs set up is kind of like having several computers in one.
3. They are a way of eliminating visual clutter, both from windows and from desktop icons. Even with tools like Expose and Dashboard, and with the rise of tabbed applications like Safari, window clutter can easily become both distracting and visually unpleasant. And if you are the type who likes to be able to see your beautiful desktop picture now and then, nothing beats escaping to a VD without all the desktop clutter for a few minutes.
4. Closely related to (3), VDs provide a way of dealing with small laptop screens. Visual clutter on laptops is almost unavoidable, but perhaps if you use VDs, you can effectively enlarge your desktop several-fold.

All of these arguments seem perfectly reasonable, and they do hold out intriguing possibilities to the rest of us. However, I’ve concluded that relatively few users will actually benefit from a system like Spaces. Further, I think there’s a much simpler, less complicated solution to some of these problems that Apple would do better to concentrate on. The solution I refer to is already used by a select few who discovered it on their own, whether by accident (like me) or while seeking a more OS-9-like windowing system.

The users who actually might benefit are probably the same ones who developed virtual desktops to begin with. Remember that VDs proliferated as a desktop paradigm on Unix systems, where most of the users were system administrators working with X-Windows if they were running any GUI tools and with text-based Unix shells, each of which were holding a session with (most likely) some remote system. For system admins who need to monitor multiple systems on one console, I can tell you it’s pretty difficult to distinguish one shell window from another. Further, if you’re responsible for managing and monitoring performance on system X and system T at the same time, it’s much easier to keep a set of windows for system X segregated on a VD and switch back and forth than to try to arrange windows for both systems on one relatively small monitor screen. If you are a real super user and have responsibilities for many more than 2 such systems, VDs become more than just a nice trick–they become a real necessity. Of course, if you switch to using a tabbed terminal app like iTerm together with a tabbed browser, some of the problems system admins faced in earlier years disappear.

I’m sure there are some other types of jobs that fall into this kind of situation–where each VD really does represent a totally different task with its own unique environment and applications–but it’s hard for me to think of any others right now.

Most of us have several applications that we use throughout the day for all the tasks we do, and if you fall in that category, I think you’ll just find VDs confusing. As an example, if you’re someone who needs to keep an email client close at hand for pretty much your whole day, don’t make the mistake of trying to pin that client–or one of its windows–to a particular desktop.

Another such application for many of us is our web browser. I found it impossible to segregate one browser window and its tabs for “task A” and another window for “task B” and one for “personal” etc. Browser tabs and windows are just too unpredictable and hard to control. And the minute you find yourself wasting precious moments trying to remember which desktop you left Gmail on, you’re using up whatever goodwill you allocated to virtual desktops at the beginning of your experiment. Besides, let’s recall that VDs arose before web browsers supported tabs, and now that they do, it’s easy to use tabs to create multiple “desktops” within your browser itself.

And what about apps like Activity Monitor or Disk Utility? Do they get pinned to a particular desktop, or are they free to float among them? Depending on which VD tool you try, you may or may not find it confusing to get a particular window to show up on all your desktops, and even more difficult to erase it from one while keeping it on the other three. From my experience, the minute you start trying to custom-assign windows to particular desktops, you might begin experiencing flakiness. As I said, if you find yourself going from desktop to desktop searching for a tool like Activity Monitor, you’re working too hard at the whole virtual desktop thing.

There’s also a bit of a catch-22 involved if you have several applications (as I do) that you need to have at your side throughout the day. On the one hand, if you try to put all your “always need them” apps in, say, one desktop, you end up just making them harder to reach than they are now. How? Well, think about it… Using a VD is kind of like using Dashboard: Getting to it requires first some keystroke or mouse movement and the time for a transition effect. Unlike Dashboard, if you use more than one VD, you also have to remember exactly which set of keystrokes will get you there. If you use a “pager” you have to first invoke the pager and then click on it with the mouse or use a keystroke.

One of the main reasons more people don’t use Dashboard, from what I’ve read, is that it exists on a separate layer from the desktop: You have to “travel” to get there, as well as to get back. Not much effort, you say? I fully agree. And yet, it presents an obstacle that many would rather avoid. As much as I love the Dashboard, I don’t keep anything there that I need to refer to more than once or twice a day. Instead, I use the developer mode and move any truly critical widgets to my desktop.

OK, suppose you decide to let your critical apps show up on all of your VDs. So that each VD will have a Finder window or two, a browser window, a mail window, a chat window (if you partake), your VOIP client (ditto), a word processor or spreadsheet, and so on. If you take that route, you’re back to where you started: Window clutter and everything all cozy together on one desktop.

If you then have discrete tasks like photo editing or moviemaking or audio processing or animation or programming or whatever it may be, you end up with separate virtual desktops for each of these tasks, with each desktop differing only in the one or two apps associated with those tasks. Now, if this is the case, and if you don’t actually need Soundtrack open when you’re using Photoshop, or you don’t need Smultron open when you’re using Aperture, or iMovie can simply sleep when you’re blogging with Ecto, then why not just close them when you’re done and reopen them? Wouldn’t that be easier on the old virtual memory and processor? Keeping a set of applications open just so they’re ready for you when you visit once a day merely puts stress on CPU and ties up virtual memory, thereby reducing efficiency in the applications you’re currently using. On top of that, doing this consumes an extra brain cell or two to remember which desktop applications “belong” in.

So, what did I hope to get from virtual desktops like Spaces? I had most of the hopes expressed in the four rationales stated earlier, but here’s what I learned and the alternatives I’ve adopted for each.

Reducing window proliferation

My solution for window proliferation is Single Application Mode (SAM). SAM isn’t an “official” part of Mac OS X, but there are quite a few tools that support it. What is SAM? Basically, it’s a mode that causes the active application (and all of its windows) to hide automatically when you switch to another app. There are a multitude of applications and utilities that enable this mode, and all of them that I’ve tried define the Shift key as a default override, so that if you don’t want the active app to hide, hold the shift key while you select the next one.

After beginning to write more about SAM at this point in the article, I’ve decided that the topic is too big–and too interesting–to distract from the main topic of this article. So look for another article soon that will take an in-depth look at SAM and its history and uses on Mac OS X.

The bottom line is that SAM keeps your workspace clean and uncluttered. You never have to worry about seeing multiple app windows sprawling across the desktop and trying to find the right one. With SAM, you just use the application switcher (Alt-Tab) or Dock to switch apps, and all apps are readily available on the same desktop. If you need a better way to organize related apps than either the Dock or Finder provide, most users will do better to try one of the many “dock replacement” apps that are out there—apps such as Drag Thing, Overflow, Drop Drawers, or the freeware Yada—or go with a full-service menubar utility like Butler, ClawMenu, MenuStrip, or You Control, which let you easily define your own custom groups of apps and access them from the menubar.

Keeping work spaces separate

This is one of the motivations for VDs that I thought had the most promise starting out. I began by considering the distinct work processes I engage in both at home and at work:

1. Blogging (writing articles)
2. Programming (writing code)
3. Designing (mostly for the web)
4. Researching (for any of the above)
5. Processing Classic 45s orders
6. Adding Classic 45s inventory
7. Testing software
8. Communicating (with staff, family, friends, colleagues, managers)
9. Managing projects (mostly software development)
10. Shopping (for work and pleasure)
11. Recording music (mostly from my 45 collection)
12. Screencasting (mostly for the blog).
13. Managing websites (various at work at home)

Contemplating setting up 13 different VDs, however, seemed like too much work… at least until I was convinced of the value of doing so. Instead, I tried starting with three desktops: One for non-Web activities, one for web-related activities, and one for personal activities. The problem with this was that so much of my life got crammed into the web-activities desktop that the others seemed superfluous. The main benefit to this arrangement was that when my manager would pop in, I could quickly switch from my personal desktop to one of the other two, thereby hiding activities I might not want the upper types to know about.

I really couldn’t think of a logical way of dividing my activities into discrete desktops in a way that made sense, because so many of them are interrelated–at least, in terms of the applications they rely on. Let me go through my analysis of this, starting with the above activities list:

    Blogging

• Safari/WebKit (research)
• Ecto (writing)
• DevonThink Pro (research/testing notes)
• Photoshop (illustrations)
• TextEdit (HTML tools)
• Constrictor (screenshots)

Even if I had only one window for each of these applications open in my Blogging Desktop, it would be so cluttered without SAM as to be no better than no VD at all. Typically when I’m blogging, I keep all of these apps running, as well as some other tools like Activity Monitor, Observation Post, Skype, Ovolab Phlink, and Remote Desktop. And that’s just the ones that have windows! I never know when I’ll need to refer to Activity Monitor, and Observation Post lets me know via Growl when USB connections, network ports, or Bonjour services come and go. Skype is my VOIP phone, and Phlink notifies me via a small bezel who’s calling on the land line. Remote Desktop is just part of my continual duties as household system admin.

    Programming

• Smultron (text editor)
• WebKit/Firefox/Opera (testing)
• Photoshop (graphic design)
• PixelStick (graphic design)
• YummyFTP (file transfers)
• CocoaMySQL (database tool)

And that’s just for starters. If I’m working on a Dashboard widget, I might be also running Widgetopia or Dashcode, and if I’m doing heavy CSS coding I’ll have StyleMaster open, as well as a couple of Dashboard widgets running on the desktop (e.g., my PHP reference widget, CSS reference, etc.). Again, this is way too many windows to fit onto any one desktop, and to separate them onto different desktops would make my work harder—not easier.

    Designing web graphics

• Photoshop (graphic design/editing)
• Constrictor/SnapzPro (screenshots)
• Safari/WebKit (preview)
• Smultron/TextEdit (HTML editing)
• PixelStick (graphic ruler)

Again, just the basics. This comes closest to working, but if you try to have all of these visible on the same desktop, you’ll either find yourself constantly arranging the windows to keep your environment from looking like a bad Windows desktop, or you’ll understand why Windows users yearn so for a “true” maximize feature in Mac OS X so they can make the other apps hide by basically creating a full screen view of each app. Sorry, in my book “true maximize” is just another way of achieving single-application mode. Only, you no longer have any desktop real estate for anything else, either aesthetic (like a desktop picture or background Quartz composition) or functional (like Activity Monitor or Dashboard/Yahoo widgets). If what you want is SAM, then do SAM the Mac way!

I think you get the picture by now… certainly, talking through it has only convinced me of the fallacy behind this particular rationale for virtual desktops. And that’s without even considering what to do with apps like iTunes, System Preferences, Mail, and Preview that I’m likely to have open most of the day no matter what I’m doing.

Eliminating visual clutter

Isn’t this the same as “window proliferation”? Well, it’s certainly very closely related. However, when people talk about using virtual desktops to eliminate visual clutter, they’re typically thinking of easily enabling an environment free of desktop icons as well as application windows. Many users need this in order to take clean screenshots of their desktops, while others just want to escape for awhile to a specially designed desktop picture or movie that isn’t compromised by unnecessary visual elements. Unfortunately, from my tests, none of the current crop of virtual desktop apps can eliminate desktop icons, and they don’t let you define specific desktop items for each desktop. Your desktop folder is still your desktop folder, and it shows up even if you can customize the desktop picture for each VD.

To eliminate desktop icons, there are numerous alternatives that are easier to implement and use than virtual desktop software. My choice at the moment is an application enhancer called DesktopSweeper, which simply sweeps away all the desktop icons whenever I navigate away from the Finder. It’s highly customizable and does its thing automatically, without me having to worry about it. This means my one desktop is always free of clutter, unless I’m working in the Finder. And even then, it’s my choice to see the desktop icons when Finder is active. If you don’t want to run Unsanity’s APE, there are other options. One I just discovered recently comes in the unlikely form of the Mac OS X maintenance/customizer utility MacPilot, which has “Show icons on the desktop” as the first checkbox in its Finder pane. Just deselect this checkbox, restart Finder, and you’ll find that all your desktop icons are gone… even when you’re in the Finder! This may be a little extreme for most folks, so I strongly recommend DesktopSweeper.

If you want to temporarily switch desktop pictures, there are again a large number of options. For a fee, you can use DeskShade, which works quite well and also lets you run QuickTime movies on your desktop. A terrific freeware tool that I use is PictureSwitcher, which has pretty much the same basic features as DeskShade, but is actually a bit more convenient to use. If I need to switch to a standard Mac OS X desktop picture, or to a plain white background, PictureSwitcher lets me do this with a couple of clicks on its menubar icon menu. There’s also a fairly new Dashboard widget called Imperium that will do much the same thing.

However, lately I’ve found myself doing that less and less for simple screenshots. Since discovering Constrictor, I don’t need to live by SnapzPro X’s rules anymore. Constrictor has the very neat trick of letting you specify a background color for your screenshots, and it can preserve transparency when saving a TIFF screenshot. This lets you take standard-looking screenshots no matter what desktop picture you’re currently using. In fact, if you use Constrictor this way and set it to open its saved files in Photoshop, you’ll discover that they have no background at all! You have the application window and its generated shadow against a transparent background. From here, you can put whatever you need to in the background when finishing up the shot.

Enlarging small laptop displays

Oops! I said I’d tell you how I’ve dealt with each of these rationales for virtual desktops, didn’t I? I was mistaken… I’ve never used a laptop for any length of time, so I can’t advise you on how to deal with this. I’ll bet having a 15- or 13-inch display really sucks!

If I were in this boat, as I may be if I finally take the laptop plunge in 2007, I’m pretty sure I’d still find SAM a big help, and I know I’d also keep my 23″ monitor for use at home. Nothing beats a large monitor, and you’re going to be mistaken if you think Spaces or any other virtual desktop application can save you from this basic truth.

Conclusion

I still think the concept of VDs is cool, and the most rewarding aspect of using ones like Virtue Desktops is getting to see all those stunning animations as you change desktops. But as a practical tool to make me more productive, Not!

If you’ve read any of my past articles on Mac OS X and Apple, you know I’m not a knee-jerk critic of the fine company in Cupertino. However, in this case I think they’ve chosen the wrong “cool new feature” to promote. That’s not just because the current, pre-release version of Spaces has failed to wow me: It’s because I don’t think VDs are the answer to anyone’s window clutter problems. In fact, VDs have the potential to make Mac OS X more complicated than necessary, which isn’t the way the company usually leads. If someone like me, who lives and breathes Mac software and computers in general, finds VDs confusing, I can only conclude that they don’t have much potential to enhance the overall usability of Mac OS X.

As far as innovation is concerned, there’s also nothing innovative about Spaces, as it turns out. The one innovation I assumed was Apple’s idea was the ability to drag windows and apps around in the “pager,” as the August WWDC demo showed. Certainly, that elicited a lot of “oohs” and “aahs” from the developer audience that day. What I didn’t realize is that both of the current commercial VD implementations—Codetek VDTP and You Control: Desktops—incorporate that feature. So, Apple doesn’t even have decent bragging rights with Spaces. (It’s true that Spaces shows live thumbnails of windows in its elegant pager, which is a distinct improvement.)

Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m totally off-base here, and that VDs are a lot more valuable than I’m giving them credit for. Perhaps I just haven’t figured out how to use them effectively. Whether I’m right or wrong about them, I promise to keep an open mind, which is just the way I was brought up here on Mars.

Notes on the virtual desktop applications

Virtual Desktops	Version	Price	Pros	Cons
CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro	3.1	40	Stable, logical, reliable Many options to fine-tune the way the application works Custom desktop images Flexible keyboard shortcuts and use of mouse to trigger changes Defaults with list of common applications and suggested settings (e.g., Finder) “Pager” lets you move windows of applications to different desktops	Expensive No custom transitions Too many options… can take a long time to set up just so Pager a little small, even at its largest size
Virtue Desktops	0.53r260a	0	Lots of customization options to distinguish each desktop by appearance—desktop background, color, type, etc. Pager is placed at your cursor when invoked	Limitations: Can’t clean up Desktop icons even if you hide the Finder for a particular desktop.? Sometimes windows don’t “stick” to desktops as they should Sometimes applications move to desktops when you just specified to move a window. In general, functions for specifying window/app associations with desktops is buggy. Prone to crashing. After about 5 minutes, Virtue crashed when I was customizing one desktop.
Spaces	1	0	Simple, easy, fun interface The ability to move windows from one desktop to another in the F8 configuration mode is by far the easiest way to set virtual desktops up that I’ve seen. Application switches intelligently and logically from one space to another as you switch applications and windows. Absence of “option bloat” is refreshing. Spaces only lets you do so much, which reduces the temptation to fiddle endlessly.	No way to “name” spaces, which makes it hard to keep them straight. It wasn’t possible to set different Finder windows in different Spaces. The application keeps consolidating all of them together. This occurs even if you set Space restrictions on the Finder. Can’t set different desktop backgrounds for each Space. Spaces provides no other settings that would designate visual cues about which Space you’re working in, so again it’s hard to keep them straight.
You Control: Desktops	1.2	30	Very easy to use Each desktop can have its own desktop image and folder, as well as an optional text label Pallette view lets you move app windows from desktop to desktop Menu options give more fine-grained control but may be overkill; use of pallette view keeps it simple Intuitive controls and just enough options Typical selection of transitions and keyboard shortcuts	No keyboard shortcut for pallette view? Setting one brought up the menu interface even though I had specified pallette view in the menubar Somewhat expensive
Desktop Manager	0.5.3 0.6 beta	0	Better than I remember it. Nice options. Compatible with skins from CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro	List of applications in main desktop … many don’t have names. On a given desktop, you can’t choose applications or windows from another. Doesn’t appear to be a way to show the same window on two different desktops. (e.g., Finder?)… Wait! Opt-Cmd-O brings up the window manager. You can then choose to move a window to another desktop or show on all. Can’t have different desktop pictures for each desktop.

Addendum: A few VD Links

1. Wikipedia article on virtual desktops
2. Wikipedia article on X window managers
3. Review of virtual desktops on the Apple Blog
4. Article from MacProductive.com
5. ATPM Review of Virtue Desktops
6. MacMuser Thoughts on Virtual Desktops
7. MacZealots article on Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), followed by a representative discussion of the pros/cons of virtual desktops.

Hello, my name is Leland Scott, and I am a software addict. Put me in front of a cool-looking website with cool-looking software to download, and I’ll use my hefty Verizon FIOS bandwidth to have that sucker on my hard drive almost before Safari has a chance to warn me that the download might contain an application.

This didn’t used to be a serious problem… it was just a harmless, fun pastime. But in recent years, Mac OS X software has been on a major growth spurt. Each year the problem gets worse. There’s a Windows blogger I know who has a similar problem, and I really don’t know how he copes. He developed a cool website to publish his thoughts and let the world know of his favorite Windows applications, called The Great Software List. He’s been doing this for years, and it shows: The site is well organized, and he clearly explains his standards for great software and why he’s chosen the ones he has. The author has 184 Windows applications on the list… these are the apps that have earned his highest 5-star rating.

When I think about how many mediocre Windows apps he has to wade through to find these gems, my head spins. Keeping up with the onslaught of Windows software releases has to be a more-than-full-time job. I’m assuming there are probably at least 5 Windows apps released for every Mac app these days… That’s purely a guess, deliberately on the low side of a hypothesis based on the assumed Mac market share. I would go absolutely bonkers if I tried to download and demo any more software than I already do, which is simply overwhelming nowadays. I wonder if worries about viruses, spyware, and other malware keep my Windows counterpart’s download addiction under some control? Maybe so…

For the last 12 months or so, I’ve been trying out a way to manage my software habit in a rational manner. Here are the steps I’ve taken:

1. I stopped monitoring both VersionTracker and MacUpdate for new software and use only the MacUpdate RSS feed now.
2. All software downloaded is tagged, with a brief description, version number, and home page URL, and I blog the download to my del.icio.us bookmarks as well as to the Software Addicts page I built for newly added software.
3. As time permits, I go through that list, usually starting from the oldest items, and carefully try the software out, jotting down my impressions (pros and cons) and deciding whether to chuck it or adopt it.
4. If the software is in a category for which I’ve already downloaded several apps to try out, I’ll try to demo them all as a group. In this case, the notes get stored in a DevonThink Pro sheet to keep them organized.
5. When I make a decision, I’ll write up a mini-review.
   • If it’s software I really like a lot, I’ll take some screenshots and often a screencast and publish them in the Recommended Software section.
   • For full-category reviews, I’ll publish them as major articles on the Mars blog. Such reviews can take several days to prepare, given my over-meticulous attention to detail. I’ve recently published such reviews for iTunes controllers, podcasting tools, MySQL managers, personal information managers, and several others.
   • For rejected software, I write up a mini-review for the Rejected Software section, often with screenshots, and usually with my table of pros and cons.
6. Afterward, I clean up my hard drive, moving rejects out of the “Demo Software” folder and winners to my Applications folder somewhere. If a winner requires a license fee, I’ll pony up for that. (Do you see why I might be biased toward freeware on Mars?) In DevonThink, I toggle checkboxes to done, and I’m finished! Ta Da!

So, what exactly has this done for me? Mostly, it’s kept me from downloading the same software over and over. As an addict, I’ll download any software with a “download” button if I’m not careful. (Pathetic, I know.) My 50-year-plus brain just has a hard time keeping track of what software I’ve tried and what I’ve said “Yuck” to. I’m pretty good about remembering software I’ve adopted, especially if there was a price tag attached. But it’s the large—and exponentially growing—category of Software I Haven’t Tried that causes me problems. With this system, I can easily find out if I’ve already tried iSoftware or xApp and when. I can also recall what I thought of it, and what specifically was wrong with it. If I’ve already downloaded and registered a given app, this keeps me from doing that again.

The plan was to help me get through my demo software list more quickly. After all, that’s play-time for me. A huge part of my addiction is a love of the New: Seeing what new ideas programmers have come up with to solve a given computing problem. And as we all know, Mac users in general are typically the most creative in their field, which means Mac programmers are forever coming up with a better mousetrap of some kind or other.

However, the plan has failed miserably. Demoing software has become too much like work, and not enough like fun. My Demo Software folder just keeps growing, no matter how fast and efficiently I work at whittling it down. This means that I always seem to be running 6-9 months behind, trying out software I downloaded 6-9 months ago rather than the ones I downloaded yesterday and was so excited about. Here’s a chart of my “software punchlist” that I started keeping 6 months ago (in June 2006). It shows the number of software packages I’ve reviewed and adopted, the number I’ve downloaded to try out, and the number I’ve reviewed and rejected. In some ways, it’s a gratifying measure of achievement, but it’s not exactly the achievement I was after.

For awhile, I was able to keep the “pending review” list stable at about 250, but it’s started to creep up again lately. Besides, stabilizing at 250 wasn’t the plan… I wanted to get that list down to zero over time, so I could try out the latest and greatest while they were still that! And even this relative stability has been achieved only by putting aside many of my other addictions: Programming, web site design, Mac OS X theming, record collecting, and writing on other subjects. So, something’s got to give, and it’s going to have to be my approach to managing software addiction.

From now on, my mini-reviews are going to be a lot more concise. Any software-category reviews I do will likewise be much more pithy. Fewer words. Fewer images and movies. I’ve simply got to spend less time writing up reviews and more time actually reviewing. This will also mean that rather than giving some software packages my full attention—in order to adhere to my innate notions of fairness—some will be dismissed or recommended after much shorter “spins around the block.” In other words, first impressions will prevail more often than not. Software that makes me get out the owner’s manual in order to get started isn’t going to get out of the parking lot.

One thing I have to keep reminding myself about here is that I’m not earning any money from this activity. I’m not asking software companies to give me licenses for reviewed software (well, very rarely), and I’m under no obligation to pay attention to what advertisers or sponsors of this website (which I aim to keep at zero) think about the views expressed here. Heck, I don’t even like the idea of cluttering the site up with Google adwords ads, let alone the numerous other “affiliate” ads I could take advantage of.

But there’s no shortage of Mac OS X software addicts shouting their opinions on software to the world these days. I think Mac users do this much more than Windows users, simply because there’s so much more great Mac software as a percentage of the total. So, does the world really need to hear from another Mac software addict blogging about what he thinks the best Mac OS X launcher software is? Or what his top 10 favorite Dashboard Widgets may be?

Actually, I think it does.

I have increasingly come to believe that pro technology journalists over time evolve to become an extension of software companies’ advertising strategy. There’s an inherent conflict of interest between the desire to fulfill a public good by conducting a fair review of new software—thereby aiding readers in making what may sometimes be difficult or confusing selections among competing or overlapping products—and the obligation a publisher feels to the companies whose products make its very existence possible. Getting to know and becoming pals with the development staff of software companies would sure be fun, but it doesn’t do much to help you maintain an independent viewpoint, does it? As much as I admire Macworld and its knowledgeable staff, its coverage of Mac OS X software has become increasingly suspect over the years. Perhaps it was always suspect, and I just didn’t know enough about the market myself to realize it.

I don’t mean to pick on Macworld unduly… I think the same thing is true of any commercial journalist who’s trying to cover a product market for her readers. Yes, they have bounds within which they need to operate in order to maintain credibility, but ultimately if you’re a food critic who is always treated like royalty at Restaurant A, you’re liable to end up promoting Restaurant A at the expense of Restaurant B, which you may never have heard of, or which didn’t know who you were when you stopped by to chow down. This is the topic of an entire other article. I touch on it here only to explain why I believe the world’s a better place for guys like me and my Windows colleague, who simply want to celebrate great software and let others know of their findings.

As much as I love great Mac software and relish trying out the latest and greatest new shareware, I’ll stop sharing my opinions if I ever think I’m getting too cozy to any particular product or company to be objective. Piss me off with a lousy upgrade, or neglect your previously great product while a newcomer rushes in to fill a growing need, and I won’t hesitate to jump ship and shout about why I think the newcomer deserves attention. Brand loyalty, be damned! You’ve got to earn my praise for each product, and you’ve got to keep your product up to date to sustain it. Like the author of The Great Software List, I’ve got high standards and a philosophy of interface usability that’s all too often disappointed by shoddy, mediocre software. One of these days, I’ll take the time to write those standards down.

One thing I refuse to do, however, is to get treatment for my software addiction. Great software is one of the reasons I love my Mac, and I simply won’t give it up. Yes… I am a software addict, and proud of it!

However, I do need to tone it down so that my other obsessions can be fed once in awhile, too.

In August 2005, I was all pumped up to make my first podcast, and the webosphere was full of great advice, new tools, and lots of encouragement from Mac zines and blogs. I was particularly excited to put together an "enhanced" podcast using the new iTunes extensions Apple had released earlier that summer. With enhanced podcasts, you can embed "chapters" into a single audio file, and mark each chapter with text and images. That way, when the podcast plays in your iPod or in iTunes, the text forms a set of hyperlinks so the user can hop from one part of the podcast to another, while your chapter pictures help set the mood. This was a great new publishing medium, and obviously publishers all around the world were excited to adapt their ideas to it.

The podcast tool market was still in its infancy a year ago, but already there were quite a few choices. There were fewer choices for doing enhanced podcasts, but I had no trouble finding a good piece of freeware for my experiment: ChapterToolMe was awkwardly named but easy to use, and in no time I had a podcast to submit to the iTunes music store.

The aim of my podcast experiment was to publish the latest mp3 snippets added to the Classic 45's "Jukebox," and I planned to include a brief, spoken narrative about each 45 rpm record. I used Soundtrack Pro to assemble the audio file, and that was the time-consuming part. Stringing the mp3 bits together didn't take too long, but getting the narrative just right did. After doing one, I decided I simply wouldn't have time to make a series out of this, and my life moved on to other creative endeavors. (To my surprise, I see that my original podcast is still in the iTunes inventory... you can find it by searching for "Classic 45s Jukebox" or perhaps trying this URL.)

In the last year, podcasting has become mainstream, and every organization that was publishing RSS feeds the year before is now getting podcasts out. I haven't honestly subscribed to enough podcasts to know how many publishers are preparing "enhanced" 'casts, but given the continued popularity of iTunes, I assume that format is still quite popular. All the while, the back of my mind has kept returning to the question of doing a podcast with the rich storehouse of music in the Classic 45's Jukebox. After all, I make the mp3's and write the descriptions up already. Since the snippets are only about a minute each, have very low-quality audio, and are typically from recordings that are no longer available commercially, I didn't think copyright issues would be... well, an issue.

A few months ago, I finally sat down and adapted my PHP script that updates the regular RSS feed for Classic 45's to create a new feed just for jukebox items, including an enclosure tag for the mp3 files. Then the project lay dormant until last week, when a possible method of automating the podcast process suddenly hit me.

Rather than putting together one big audio file, with recorded narration, and then dividing it into chapters using an enhanced podcast tool, I could just release each mp3 file as a separate episode. Each episode could include the text narration and facts about the record, plus the label or sleeve scan I normally include on the site. I wasn't totally sure this would work, but it seemed worth testing. If it worked, I could release a podcast without eating away up any more of my precious spare time. When I pointed Safari to the mp3 feed I'd made earlier, it loaded the "podcast" right up, displaying the HTML and image content along with a link to the enclosed mp3 file for the last 36 jukebox items. I then went to iTunes and entered the feed URL as a new Podcast subscription, and lo and behold, iTunes also loaded the feed, even providing little buttons for subscribers to download each episode they want.

So, the concept seemed sound, and the next step seemed to be a tools review. Was there some cool new application that would help me with the project? Perhaps there were new capabilities of the podcast specification that I could leverage. Thus, the usual sequence of my life played out again: One project led to another!

Somehow, I thought I'd still need the capabilities of Apple's Chapter Tool to embed images or text into the media, so my review would include "enhanced" podcast software as well as "regular" podcast makers. For those who aren't hip to the different kinds of podcasts, it boils down to these three basic kinds:

1. Podcasts adhering to the RSS 2.0 specification.
2. Podcasts adhering to RSS 2.0 spec plus Apple's iTunes extensions, and
3. iTunes podcasts enhanced with Apple's Chapter Tool software.

The first two kinds refer solely to the XML code and content within the RSS file itself. (The main difference between podcasts, vidcasts, etc. and regular RSS feeds is that the 'casts have a media-file "enclosure" that becomes linked content for the feed.) Enhanced podcasts actually have a different kind of enclosure: An MPEG4 AAC file that has embedded meta data, which can include text and/or images. Apple introduced the free Chapter Tool software and this new kind of podcast with the release of iTunes 4.9 in June 2005. (How time flies!)

OK, lesson over...

Besides the ability to create enhanced podcasts and my usual exacting standards for the software's user interface, my ideal Podcast-making tool would have the following virtues:

• Import existing podcast feeds.
• Support for the iTunes RSS extensions.
• Support for the full RSS 2.0 spec.
• A built-in RSS validator.
• Built-in publishing of feeds to FTP/SFTP, Webdav (including .Mac), and local folders.
• Preview for HTML content in episode descriptions.
• Support for editing HTML content
• Ability to play the episode's audio content within the interface.
• Ability to easily add images for the feed and episodes.
• Built-in search for podcast and feed content.

So, what did I find from my podcast tools survey in November 2006? A heckuva lot of great podcasting software---that's what!

Honestly, I don't think I could actually pan any of these tools. There are clearly some shining stars here, but no black holes this time out. I did testing and took notes on the following 10 applications for developing and publishing podcasts on Mac OS X (the "shining stars" are labeled with a checkmark: ):

1. Cast Life
2. ChapterToolMe
3. Feedati
4. Feeder
5. FeedForAll
6. Podcast AV
7. Podcast Maker
8. Podcaster
9. ProfCast
10. Vodcaster

Once again, I know there are a few knowledgeable readers who are wondering why GarageBand---Apple's own Podcast-making tool---isn't on this list. There are several reasons:

• First, GarageBand isn't primarily intended for making Podcasts---that's just a new feature Apple tacked on to the 2006 version.
• Second, GarageBand was very flaky in the podcast department when I first tried it, starting with the fact that I couldn't get its podcast template to work. Every time I selected "Podcast" from the list of possible projects and enter a name for the project, GarageBand would return me to the "Starting Points" screen to select a project. That got old really fast.
• Third, about the time I figured out I could make an ad-hoc podcast by choosing that track type in any old GarageBand file, I realized that using GarageBand was going to be like Soundtrack Pro all over again. Its idea of a podcast is someone manually piecing together some tracks of music or some narratives and then lovingly massaging it with chapters, text, and images. But I'd decided I didn't have time for that.
• And finally, I realized that GarageBand was missing a key functionality: It couldn't import my remote podcast from its XML feed.

So, although GarageBand clearly doesn't suck for its main intended use, it definitely wouldn't be useful to me in my new podcasting enterprise. GarageBand was the first software I tried, and it just never made it onto my DevonThink spreadsheet. However, as you might notice when looking over the applications I did review, GarageBand would be perfect for someone who does want to make an enhanced podcast and doesn't care about automation and remote XML files. Plus, if you have a new-model Mac or have purchased iLife '06, you already have GarageBand on your hard drive!

For a wrapup and a few notes on lessons learned, see the Addendum.

Cast Life

Cast Life is a beautiful little Mac OS X Cocoa application that is marvelously easy to use, but somewhat limited in its abilities. At $10, it's the least expensive shareware product here, but you get quite a bit for that price. Cast Life has great range, handling regular text (news) feeds as well as photo, video, and music feeds (otherwise known as podcasts). The first time you start it up, Cast Life gets you going in grand visual style, with a Quartz ripple effect to transition the user from the starting points sheet to the feed data entry interface. Also noteworthy is Cast Life's excellent search tool and flexibility in publishing options.

As much as I like Cast Life, however, the "whaddaya expect for ten bucks" question popped up several times during testing. Most significant are the tool's tendency to crash, the absence of preview functions, and the limited support for RSS extensions and options in developing your feed. Although Cast Life has a nice iLife media browser, it gives you no way to browse your hard drive outside of the iLife content to import artwork and sound files. Still, I think it's a great starter podcasting tool, given its low price, ease of use, and good coverage of the basics.

ChapterToolMe

ChapterToolMe is pretty much the same application I used in August 2005, having had only one or two minor updates since then. As a free tool for developing enhanced podcasts, it still can't be beat and is definitely a step above working with Apple's free Chapter Tool software on your own. However, it doesn't have most of the basic functionality I'm looking for this year, so it wasn't hard to pass on it this time. If you have GarageBand, you're probably better off using that, since ChapterToolMe can only do the enhancement to your audio file. You then need a separate tool to prepare your RSS feed. With GarageBand, you just send the podcast file off to iWeb, and it will make a nice HTML page and the RSS feed to boot! It even lets you submit the feed to the iTunes music store (something a few of the other tools here do as well). What I'm saying is that time seems to have passed ChapterToolMe by... any Mac user today can get the same (and better-looking!) tools in the iLife suite, plus the rest of the podcasting "life cycle."

Feedati

Feedati is so new it's only at version 0.1 today. According to the writeup on Feedati's website, it's incorporated the very cool Sparkle autoupdate framework, but thus far users haven't had a chance to make use of it. Clearly, Feedati is just at the beginning stage of the developer's vision, and only time will tell if that vision gets fleshed out further or Feedati fades into the very large background of fellow apps that time (and their developers) forgot. Not that there's anything seriously wrong with Feedati... it just has fairly limited functionality at this point, plus one or two very annoying bugs (for which I finally found a workaround). Two big drawbacks from my personal standpoint are that Feedati is iTunes-tag-specific (meaning it doesn't support the standard RSS 2.0 elements or options), and its XML export function is broken. Still, it's free, and might be worth a look for that reason alone if you have a very tiny (or zero) budget.

Feeder

I distinctly remember Feeder from my look at tools in the summer of 2005, since it has the same distinctive icon. Then, as now, it doesn't support enhanced podcasts, and at $30 it's not cheap... both reasons why I didn't use it for my first podcast experiment. However, clearly the Feeder developers have been very busy in the last year, because their podcast software today is among the most polished and well-rounded of the bunch here.

The thing that struck me most when I tried Feeder last week was what a terrific job it does at previewing your feed. It defaults to a view that looks just like the standard Safari RSS template, faithfully displaying your HTML formatting and images. Feeder's user interface is very well designed, making it simple to find everything you need... while hiding the complexity of all the potential things you don't yet know you want. Feeder has full support for the iTunes extensions as well as the standard RSS 2.0 spec, and it's the only app here that provides a working preview of how your feed is going to look in the iTunes interface. On top of that, Feeder is one of only two apps here that provide a good HTML editing environment for designing your feed's description field, which---as the screenshot shows in one of my sample episodes---can also include images, hyperlinks, and all the rest.

Aside from one or two small bugs, the two deficiencies I noted in Feeder were its lack of support for enhanced podcasts, and its inability to attach a separate image to each episode (outside of the description field).

FeedForAll

(Note: Updated 11/20 with information for version 2.0.0.5. Changes from the original writeup are noted with cross-outs.) My initial impression of FeedForAll was "Yuck!" However, that was simply an irrational, visceral reaction to the software's obvious Windows XP roots. Not only does it have those awful, childish-looking icons, but when I first ran FeedForAll, it was so much slower than all the other Mac tools here I was certain it had simply crashed. Turns out I was wrong about that... it's just extremely slow. Eventually FeedForAll will finish loading itself, and when you ask it to import a remote feed, it will eventually finish loading the feed. You just have to be patient. Of course, the developer could help out here by following Apple's user interface guidelines, which suggest use of a progress indicator when a process is going to take awhile. All you get in FeedForAll is the spinning beach ball, which most of us have come to associate with a hung application rather than one that's just working hard.

Once I was ready to give FeedForAll a serious workout, I was impressed by the depth and breadth of its abilities. FeedForAll is a serious tool that has all the power most publishers will want from a podcasting experience. The first thing that impressed me was FeedForAll's built-in RSS validator: It helped me knock out a few syntax errors that might have caused trouble down the line. FeedForAll won't even import your feed until you correct the errors, by the way---this could be annoying or pleasing depending on your personality. Also impressive is the application's useful HTML editor and its ability to preview your HTML content. Another notable virtue in FeedForAll's favor is the wealth of PHP scripts the developer makes available to its registered users for manipulating RSS feeds in various ways.

On the downside, FeedForAll is the most expensive tool available for the Mac. At $40, that's only $10 more than its competition, but it's hard to justify given the quality of the $30 tools here. More seriously, FeedForAll fails iTunes users by not providing support for Apple's iTunes extensions, which really help in displaying your feed in the iTunes store. Although FeedForAll has a useful HTML preview, it doesn't let you preview your audio or video content, and it has no support for enhanced podcasts. , and your only publishing option is FTP... you can't publish to .Mac or even to a local folder. Continuing in the "fails to take full advantage of iTunes" vein, FeedForAll is also unable to associate an image with an episode, providing a feed-level image only.

Finally, as a non-Cocoa application, FeedForAll misses out on a lot of user interface tricks and functionality that Mac users are coming to expect---like sheets, panels, resizable drawers, and the like. Contrary to what I've heard from some naysayers, these Cocoa user-interface widgets make it possible to design much more functional and attractive software than is possible with Java, XUL, or COM interface objects. More than mere eye-candy, the Cocoa framework widgets simply make for better software design. (Or so it seems to me.) Given all of these "cons," I find it hard to fully recommend FeedForAll, but it's definitely a good Podcasting tool and might be worth a look if the features that are negatives for me don't mean that much to you.

Podcast AV

Podcast AV is kind of like a professional-grade ChapterToolMe. Its basic functionality is pretty much the same as ChapterToolMe and GarageBand, but it has a much better user interface than the former and bests the latter by virtue of its simplicity and focus. I love software like Podcast AV that offers to start you out with a little interactive tutorial, and this tool's tutorial is both longer and more interactive than most. For my purposes, however, Podcast AV won't cut it, since it doesn't import existing feeds, can't actually prepare a podcast feed itself, and in fact can only help you prepare the audio file for one episode at a time. If you're planning on taking advantage of the enhanced podcast features, this app is definitely worth a look. For now, it's free, though the developer's site indicates they plan to charge for it whenever it gets out of the pre-1.0 beta stage.

Podcast Maker

In terms of sheer interface ingenuity, Podcast Maker gets my vote for the brightest star on stage today. Fortunately, its good looks and interface smarts are matched pretty well by its well rounded functionality. Podcast Maker does have a few missing features, but by and large it would probably be my top choice if I were buying one of these apps today.

Besides its stunningly cool user interface, which is so nice I had to capture it in a brief movie, Podcast Maker shines through its sheer speed in importing external RSS feeds, its top-notch support for iTunes extensions, its built-in support for enhanced podcasts through use of chapters, and its ability to add an image to each separate episode of a feed. Great publishing options, search, and audio preview capability add luster to its other virtues.

However, Podcast Maker is not my ideal "podcast maker." The main things missing for me are its surprising inability to preview content stored remotely, its willingness to ignore the standard RSS 2.0 enhancements in deference to Apple's iTunes extensions, its lack of built-in previews for HTML content (there's a Preview function that I could never get to work), and its lack of support for editing HTML. Still, Podcast Maker is a pretty young tool, and it wouldn't take much to take it to the must-have level for podcast publishers.

Podcaster

Podcaster is one of the oldest tools here, having been released soon after the enhanced podcast spec came out last year. It and Podcast Maker are the only tools in the bunch that give users the tools to build both enhanced podcasts and regular ones, and similarly they alone can accomplish the trick of associating a unique image with each episode of a podcast. Naturally, it follows that both of these tools lean heavily toward the iTunes version of RSS and virtually ignore the RSS 2.0 standard. In fact, the basic functionality of Podcaster and Podcast Maker are virtually identical.

So, why have I put a checkmark by Podcast Maker but not Podcaster. This is where attention to detail really makes a difference, folks. Though Podcaster can do nearly everything Podcast Maker can, it does so with little if any finesse and with a number of annoyances. For example, to start with, Podcaster makes you download and install (by finding the right file and dropping it on Podcaster) Apple's Chapter Tool software in order to make enhanced podcasts. Until you do this, it displays an ugly "Install Chapter Tool" button prominently on its face. Another example: When you import an existing feed, Podcaster insists on taking the time to download every attachment it contains... which can take quite a long time in a case like mine with 36 episodes. (Occasionally, Podcaster will hang after such an import, forcing you to re-do it.) This might be worth the time if Podcaster could then let you play the attachments within its interface... but it can't!

Podcaster has the same limitations as Podcast Maker, and then some. Besides those already mentioned, the application provides no help file whatsoever for end users. That's just wrong! And although it has a compact interface, it's compact in a rather clunky way, thanks to its Carbon user-interface foundation. Podcaster comes in a $15 basic version, and apparently you have to pay another $15 to enable publishing to FTP sites and local folders; otherwise, it publishes only to your iDisk.

ProfCast

ProfCast is clearly designed and marketed for educators, and as such it has some features I don't need, while lacking some I do. Prominent selling points that don't sell the app on me is ProfCast's built-in voice recording function and its ability to handle attached presentation files. I'm sure these are of keen interest to teachers and professors who want to publish podcasts of their lectures and presentations, and in general ProfCast seems like an excellent tool for that use case. Along those lines, ProfCast comes with plugins for Keynote versions 2 and 3, so clearly lecturers who use Keynote will find ProfCast particularly worthy of a tryout.

Other nice aspects of ProfCast are its ability to import existing podcasts and its easy-to-use interface for managing the podcast and adding new episodes. It also has all the bases covered for publishing. The ProfCast site says it has support for enhancing files with chapters, but I didn't see that capability when testing it. Instead, I noticed that ProfCast has a plugin for GarageBand, which lets you shunt your episode audio over to it "for further editing"---which I took to mean adding chapters and such.

Aspects of ProfCast I didn't like were its import behavior (similar to Podcaster), which included a tendency to crash repeatedly when trying to import my test feed. Its ability preview the audio files it spent so much downloading is also quite flaky, and its "Import to iTunes" feature was grayed out most of the time. Finally, ProfCast provides no HTML preview of your episode and no tools for editing your episode description. At $30, ProfCast is priced at what seems to be the norm for podcasting tools, and it's probably worth that if you value its lecture-focus functionalities.

Vodcaster

Vodcaster is the best overall freeware product in this review. It easily imports existing feeds, either from remote URL's or from local XML files, and has an advanced options drawer that you can have Vodcaster pack with (nearly) every RSS extension in both the RSS 2.0 and iTunes repertoire. If you don't want that many options, just uncheck that selection in Vodcaster's preferences. Vodcaster also ably writes your RSS feed for you and lets you add new media files---either video or audio---with its built-in chooser. If you have an attached camera such as an iSight, Vodcaster can also record video (with audio) right there on the spot (but it has no video editing tools and can't enhance your media with chapter markers and images).

In general, Vodcaster has a nice interface, but there are some quirks, as noted in the table below. Perhaps befitting its nature as freeware, Vodcaster can't preview any HTML content you have prepared for the description, and it provides such a tiny rectangle for this field that you couldn't possibly enter or edit anything much there. And though Vodcaster can publish to .Mac or a local folder, it can't publish through FTP. Despite these drawbacks, Vodcaster is stable, has most of the required basics, and even has a few advanced touches. Well worth a try at $0, I'd say.

Addendum

Unlike previous forays into the software market here on Mars, this time I'm not certain I'll be buying any of these tools. Obviously, given my enthusiasm for some of them, that's not because I didn't find anything worth buying. Rather, it goes back to my need to keep my time commitment for this project to a minimum. Since I'm capable of writing a little PHP script to generate an RSS feed from the Classic 45s MySQL database, I don't really need a tool to do that for me.

One thing I didn't know prior to this project was how to attach an image file to each episode. I had already added an image to the feed item's HTML description field, but how would I get that image to show up in iTunes, which doesn't support HTML in its feed descriptions?

As it turns out, the information for a given feed or episode that you see in iTunes is a combination of the podcast's RSS content and the mp3 file's ID3 tags. In particular, the ability to add a separate image for each episode is only possible through ID3 tags, because it's not something the RSS specification supports. The only image you can add in RSS is at the feed level, and RSS supports only one image per feed. (Not counting "photocasts," in which the episode's enclosure tag consists of a photo.)

But how do you add an ID3 tag with an image to your mp3 files? Two of these applications can handle that task---Podcast Maker, and Podcaster. Since these tools also do enhanced podcasts, they're already quite agile at adding metadata to your media files, and that's what the ID3 image tag is.

And yet... once I figured this out, I realized I can just use iTunes for this. In fact, that's what happens when you add an image to a song in your iTunes collection: It becomes part of the mp3 file's ID3 tagset. What I didn't know is that when you post such an mp3 on a server and someone else downloads it, the image goes along with the file and all of its other ID3 tags, and it shows up in the user's iTunes listing. Pretty cool. So, since that's precisely what I want in this case, I don't really need a podcast-making tool that can similarly add an image to my epidodes via ID3 (although it's a nice touch).

So the main value-added features these tools offer a geek like me are feed validation, ping-service submissions, and a few other esoterically advanced features. And I suspect those are things I can get for free off the web somewhere.

Of course, if you have some content you'd like to podcast and you're not a coder, a good podcast-maker will definitely come in handy. The good news is that there are a lot of great choices at reasonable prices. The bad news is that I can't help you out by recommending just one. But then, if you're a software addict like me, you'll want to download and try out a bunch of these anyway, and I hope this review will help get you started doing just that.

Oh yeah, and in case you're interested, here's a link to my new Classic 45s Jukebox podcast. I'm currently working on a Dashboard widget for the podcast, which will let you see the text and images and play the music from within the widget. What fun!

The title of this article is deliberately provocative: I don't know the answer to the question, and I don't really care. But having been there with Firefox many times, all I can say is that Safari add-ons like SafariStand make me grateful that I don't have to find out. For me, it's much easier to utilize and keep track of one extension rather than keeping, say, six or more in sync and up-to-date.

Our culture is generally dominated by a "more is More" attitude, so that the browser with the most plugins is believed by definition to be the best horse to bet on. This is the same argument some Windows users have made for years with respect to their choice of operating system: I want to use the computer that has the most software to choose from. This argument is proven empty when you actually sit down and compare the quality of Mac software in a given functional category versus that of Windows software (don't take my word for it: Actually do it yourself sometime), and that emptiness carries over to the issue of browser plugins. Certainly, there are some software categories that you legitimately need access to a Windows PC for. But if you notice, nearly all such categories cover business, rather than personal, requirements, and they're for very narrow fields of interest indeed. The only personal software category where the Mac actually lags Windows is gaming, and I predict that the gap in gaming titles won't be nearly so large a year or two from now as it is today.

As far as the supposed dearth of plugins for Safari in comparison with Firefox, SafariStand is an excellent case-in-point. There are other excellent multifunction Safari add-ons (Saft, PithHelmet, Safari Extender, for example), but I'm highlighting SafariStand because it's not only great, but also free. After all, if a Safari user finds they are starting to buy plugins, they really should consider paying for a browser that has dozens of plugins already built in, like OmniWeb. Being the cheapskate I am, I like free things, and SafariStand is one of my favorite freebies for Safari. Besides, most Firefox extensions are free, so it seems only fair to restrict this plugins conversation to those that Safari users can add without paying extra.

In this article, I'm going to focus on just a couple of the best bits from the latest SafariStand beta, which are too wonderful to remain obscure from the Safari-loving hordes. But very briefly, here is a list of the main functions that SafariStand adds to Safari. To gather these functions into Firefox would require the gathering of a half-dozen or more separate extensions, each of which would have to be authorized and kept up to date, etc.

1. Option to restore your last workspace, or any of the pages you had open, on launch.
2. Add sidebar with thumbnail tabs.
3. Customize search engines available in the standard Google search form.
4. Automate "find" function without having to type Cmd-F.
5. Add color labels to your bookmarks.
6. Enable site alteration, customizing allowable plugins, images, JavaScript, style sheets, and more for any website.
7. Colorize the HTML source window, and make it editable.
8. Reorder tabs in a window (this is a native feature of Firefox and will be one in Safari 3.0).
9. Use the "Stand Bar", a floating palette with searchable bookmarks and history, as well as customizable SafariStand folders and RSS feeds.
10. Configure your "Bookmark Shelf," a floating palette that lets you build and access saved "workspaces," which are lists of sites you open up in a browser session and want to save for later use.
11. Access one of the best "Page Info" stores now available for any browser.
12. For any site you're visiting, easily see a list of all the cookies the site has set, examine their contents, and/or delete one or more of them.

Believe me, that's not the entire list... but I think you get the idea. SafariStand is free, is continuously being developed, and works seamlessly and quietly with Safari. You access SafariStand's settings either by the "Stand" menu that's added to the top-level menubar, or via one of two new icons you can add to your Safari toolbar. (If you try SafariStand, be sure to customize your Safari toolbar in order to add at least the SafariStand Actions Menu icon... it's the only way to access the new Page Info window, which I'll describe in a moment.)

Yet Another Improvement To Browser Tabs

The two features I want to provide more information about just showed up a few weeks ago in the latest beta release. One is a really useful, but simple, enhancement to SafariStand's thumbnail-icon sidebar that actually makes this tool usable for me. A couple of months ago, I went into detail about the design of the forthcoming Shiira 2.0's graphical tabs, comparing them with those in the new OmniWeb 5.5. As it turns out, as much as I like Shiira's thumbnail tab implementation, SafariStand's innovation is a brilliant improvement. I hope the Shiira developers are paying attention!

The main problem I've had with thumbnail tabs up to now is that if you make them small enough so that they don't consume too much screen real estate, you can't (or rather, I can't...) distinguish them clearly enough to be useful. You might as well click on the tab to see what page the tab is for, since the teeny icon is too muddy to be recognizable. You could make the tabs big enough to see the thumbnail, but then you're eating up valuable screen space. (An approach some browsers have tried, including Opera and the forthcoming Safari 3.0, is to enable tooltip-like page previews when you hover the mouse over your tabs. This is another great way of letting users distinguish tab content, although it arguably takes more effort than well-implemented thumbnail tabs.)

What SafariStand's developers have done is to add a cropping tool that lets you select the portion of web pages you want to see represented in the thumbnail. This lets you tell the browser to make a thumbnail of only a certain rectangular portion of a given web page. Since most web pages have their main graphical identification in the upper left-hand corner, you can now basically tell the browser to "blow up" that portion into your tiny thumbnail. This also lets you define how high the thumbnails will be, since you can define the height and width of the rectangle to be "iconized."

This is very cool indeed. It's also the kind of feature that a small movie can describe better than words, so check out the accompanying QuickTime animation if you're having trouble visualizing this functionality.

The new SafariStand sidebar has also been cleaned up in small ways that bring it up to date with the latest and greatest Mac OS X software: You now have the light-blue background from Mail, Ecto, iTunes, and dozens of other Mac apps, and you have the "new" standard drag bar that you can use to resize the sidebar. The new sidebar preferences let you decide whether the drag bar goes at the top of the sidebar or at the bottom. All in all, I really, really like the new sidebar. I also like the fact that I can use it while still keeping my regular Safari tab bar, because I like it, too... for different reasons.

"Page Info" Goes Graphical

The second big news in SafariStand is the "Page Info" window. I swear these developers must have read my raves about Shiira's new "Page Info" window back in August, because the new SafariStand window bears a striking resemblence to the one planned for Shiira 2.0. I find this new window invaluable, since as a developer it lets me very easily identify and peruse all the components of a given web page.

Inside the new window, you've got a screen with the basic page information: File size, referrer, user-agent string, and server headers. Next, a pane showing the page's "Sub Resources," a list similar to Safari's standard "Activity" window.

Then we get to the really good parts. First, a pane listing all the CSS files used in the page. Like Shiira's, just click on one, and the CSS file's contents can be browsed in the pane below. The list of the page's JavaScript resources works the same way. Both of these are the easiest way I've seen of quickly peeking at the scripts and CSS instructions used for a web page.

Finally, SafariStand's Page Info window has a paneful of the page's images. Here, rather than simply mimicking Shiira's excellent implementation, SafariStand's developer has improved on it. Where Shiira's window gives you a list of filenames, which you can then click to see each image in the lower pane (the same model used for CSS and JavaScript files), the latest SafariStand provides an instant preview of all the page's images, arrayed as in a Finder window set to Icon View. You also get a slider at the top of the window, which lets you set the scale factor for the icon view, so you can make the images larger or smaller. Click on an image, and a form at the bottom of the pane fills in information about it: Its filename, dimensions, and file size.

This is again so great, I had to capture a quick screencast of the way it works. Hopefully it's clear enough that you can get an accurate picture of how the window works.

Making Safari The Best That It Can Be

Now, it would be great if Apple would simply build some of these features into Safari. What I hear so often is that users think Safari simply can't do this thing or that thing... when I know for a fact that it can. You just have to find the right plugin. And there's a plugin for nearly everything you really want Safari to do. No, you can't have weather forecast information displaying in your status bar, and there's nothing quite like the Scrapbook you can use with Firefox. But honestly, there's probably more free stuff you can get for Safari than you realize.

To begin exploring, start with Jon Hicks' great compilation of Safari add-ons at PimpMySafari.com. Here, you'll find over 50 great plugins for Safari, as well as an extensive collection of "bookmarklets," which are little JavaScripts you can add to your bookmark bar to perform a variety of useful tricks. (Hicks also maintains a similar site for Camino, Firefox's native Cocoa cousin that like Safari is viewed as "plugin poor" compared with Firefox and Mozilla. )

In a quick inventory of my own Safari add-ons, here's what I'm currently using in addition to SafariStand:

• SafariBlock, an excellent ad-blocking tool comparable to Firefox's AdBlock extension. It can block Flash as well as image content, is free, reliable, and very easy to use.
• The aforementioned Safari Extender, a $10 plugin that adds a variety of functions to your contextual menu in Safari.
• Acid Search, a free plugin that adds extensive search engines and customization to the Google search bar, as well as find-as-you-type.
• Safari Tidy, a terrific free plugin that validates web pages for (x)html compliance using HTML Tidy, and puts error and warning messages in your status bar. It also does some great upgrades to Safari's standard "View Source" window.
• SafariScript, a terrific extension that takes advantage of the fact that Safari can do a heckuva lot with AppleScript that other browsers simply can't. The developer's website is a wonderland of great scripts that you can add to your new Safari Script menu, including some which are full-fledged plugins themselves.
• WebDevAdditions, a plugin that corresponds roughly with Firefox's terrific Web Developer extension. It adds an array of menu items and contextual menus that let you parse, poke, and peek at a web page's structure, design, and functionality. It's gotten steadily better since it was first introduced in mid-2005.

I highly recommend all of these add-ons to Safari, but if you're intrigued, be sure to pay a visit to PimpMySafari.com, where you'll find plenty more where those came from, with even more being added each month. You'll certainly find a prominent link to SafariStand as well! With all of these riches, there really is no need for Safari users to look enviously at the more than 1,500 extensions available for Firefox. After all, a huge number of the Firefox extensions merely cover functionality that Mac OS X "Tiger" users can get through Dashboard widgets (which are just little web pages, after all). And how many Dashboard widgets are available now, a year and a half after they were introduced? That's right... almost 2,400 as of today. Believe me, widgets are a heckuva lot more fun than browser extensions, and they're available when your browser isn't running, too.

Uh-oh, you got me started on widgets... So, just to keep this in perspective, if you don't have Tiger and want widgets, Konfabulator is now free and living at Yahoo. Wouldja believe there are now over 3,200 Konfabulator-style widgets at Yahoo's widget portal? Like the Apple-style widgets, nearly all of these are free for the taking.

If that weren't enough, Google is now in the widget business, and though fledgling at this point, has a gallery with hundreds of little web widgets that you can add to your browser to do nearly anything you can think you might want to do on the web.

Now, I don't know about you, but that's more than enough "stuff" I can get nowadays to make accessing web content easier and more enjoyable on my Mac, no matter which browser I'm using. And isn't your ability to access content and services on the web faster, easier, and more fun the final measure of success for whatever web-browsing tools you use?

Although I’ve been developing websites with MySQL for over 7 years now, until recently I had almost always used phpMyAdmin to manage my databases. phpMyAdmin is such an excellent web application and makes managing MySQL so easy that the only time I strayed was when it wasn’t available on the host server (which was very rare). When I needed a desktop MySQL client, I had turned to YourSQL, which I determined a couple of years ago was the best for me when connecting to MySQL from Mac OS X.

Update 10/24/06: In response to reader inquiries, I downloaded and tried out Navicat, and I’ve now added results for that test to the article.

For various reasons that I won’t bore readers with here, I found myself needing a Mac desktop client for MySQL again recently, so I took the opportunity to review the market once again. What surprised me most, I suppose, is how many options there are for Mac OS X users who do a little light database work. (Caveat: I am by no means a database administrator, and my knowledge of SQL and MySQL is merely sufficient to develop web applications—meaning, I can build tables, relate tables, and build queries for those tables. The tools reviewed here are from this use case alone.) In the course of testing, I tried out ten different database apps:

1. Aqua Data Studio
2. CocoaMySQL
3. DBVisualizer
4. iSQL Viewer
5. MySQL Query Browser
6. Navicat
7. PGnJ
8. RazorSQL
9. SQLGrinder
10. YourSQL

As might be expected, most of the database management utilities developed by commercial outfits—that is, companies mainly out to make a buck—look like ports of Windows software, and since most of them strive for cross-platform, cross-database compatibility, they tend to be written in Java (at least, the Mac and Linux clients are) with a Cocoa wrapper tacked on. Being ports of Windows GUI’s, they suffer from iconitis, a term that describes some developers’ tendency to build user interfaces from little square icons running horizontally across the top of the application window, preferably in 2 or more rows. Such developers seem to think that the more little squarish icons you have, the better. And that practice has made its way into the Java GUI world as well, unfortunately. One sees it in apps like OpenOffice, which isn’t surprising in that the developers of OpenOffice have taken Microsoft Office’s GUI as their primary design inspiration.

Although I approached the commercial applications with an open mind, genuinely anticipating that I’d discover some marvelous GUI gifts that would make my life as a MySQL developer even easier—or at least, something that would make them worth paying for—I gradually determined that they were the worst of the bunch for my needs. Not only were the user interfaces typically clunky and ugly, they weren’t as usable—either because they made me jump through unnecessary hoops to do basic tasks, or because they didn’t consider as “basic tasks” the use cases that consume my MySQL time. An example of such a basic task is the ability to edit textual information within the GUI. Except for Navicat, all of the commercial applications seemed to expect that you’d edit a paragraph or two (let alone 25 or 30) within a narrow, single-line table row, something I’ve never had to do in phpMyAdmin!

Not that this has crimped my style in managing my databases from Mac OS X. If I were developing with a commercial database product—Oracle, say—the story might be different. But since I’m working with an open-source database, it’s not surprising that some of the best tools for working with that database are themselves open source. And not only that, most of these are developed as native Cocoa applications, thereby endowing them with all the goodness that comes naturally with the Cocoa framework.

To make a long summary short, I identified two open-source apps and one commercial app that are my top choices for managing MySQL from a Mac client. I still like YourSQL, but it’s no longer my first choice—that going to an oldie but goodie, CocoaMySQL, which got considerably better this summer in the latest beta version (0.7b4). Both of these native Cocoa applications are excellent at what they do… but CocoaMySQL gets the nod primarily because it’s faster, offers a nifty console that shows all SQL queries made by both you and the interface, has a more flexible built-in search filter that makes finding specific rows a snap, and has far better export tools.

If you have $100 to budget for managing your MySQL data, you could do just as well with Navicat, a top-notch Mac OS X application (it’s also available for Windows and Linux) that has enough extras—particularly in the high-end database admin department—to make it worth a try. Though not perfect, Navicat is very good at what it does, is much better than any of the other commercial products, and provides a lot of functionality that is missing from the open-source apps (support for views, stored procedures, replication, and scheduling, and a slew of GUI “wizards” for building queries, tables, etc).

Here’s the summary table for this shootout, which will be followed by a brief walk-through each application showing a basic screenshot (click on the thumbnails to see a larger, full-window screenshot) and a few notes. The summary ratings here for “Power,” “Range,” and “Target” reflect my scores in trying out the following functions for each application:

• Setup
• Querying data
• Browsing data
• Adding/Modifying data
• Modifying text
• Modifying table structure
• Adding tables
• Importing/Exporting data

The scores for “Cool”, “Looks”, and “Idiots” correspond to my ratings for each application’s Innovativeness, Interface design, and Ease of use.

Name	Version	Price	Cool	Looks	Idiots	Power	Range	Target	Yes?
Aqua Data Studio	4.7.2	Free $149							No
CocoaMySQL	0.7b4	Free Open							Yes
DBVisualizer	5.1	Free $129							No
iSQL	2.1.8	Free Open							No
MySQL Query Browser	1.2.4b	Free Open							No
PGnJ	0.6	Free							No
RazorSQL	3.5	$50							No
SQLGrinder	2.0.3	$59							No
YourSQL	1.8.0e	Free Open							Yes
Navicat	6.3.2	$99							Yes

Aqua Data Studio

The best that can be said for Aqua Data Studio is that it was easy to set up my database connection. After that, pretty much everything else was way harder than it should be, or too hard period. To make matters worse, it’s got a simply awful user interface with one of the worst cases of iconitis of the bunch. As I wrote in my notes, “Yuck. Millions of little windows icons.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Icons have their place… after all, the Mac GUI (and its ancestors at Xerox Park) was built on their use. But do you know that none of these little square fellows has a tooltip? That leaves me guessing what the heck they do. Is this any way to build a user interface?

One of the enduring mysteries about this application is its name… What the heck is “Aqua” about it? Certainly not the interface! (Actually, I think the company name is “Aqua” something or other…)

CocoaMySQL

I recall trying CocoaMySQL a couple of years ago, and being unimpressed. I can’t remember why now, but that’s certainly no longer the case. CocoaMySQL is my new best friend when working with MySQL databases. It’s even friendlier than phpMyAdmin… so much so that I’m afraid I’ll have a little trouble going back. My only gripe is that it’s not a beautiful application… Not ugly, mind you, but just nothing at all special to look at. The toolbar icons are particularly plain-jane, though not as uninteresting as the application icon.

Clearly, I’m not in love with CocoaMySQL for its looks. Instead, I love it for its amazing speed: As Steve Jobs would say, I just select my database connection and “Boom!” I’m there. Besides speed, I love its breadth of talent in the import-export business. CocoaMySQL can import delimited ASCII files or SQL scripts, and it can export those formats as well as XML—a strategically important format to have your data in these days. The interface makes exporting query result sets as easy as exporting several tables or the whole shebang.

A lot of the time, I’m opening a database to enter some text record or edit one. So I really appreciate CocoaMySQL’s attention to this little requirement. When you open up a table in this software, you enter a tabbed interface starting with the table structure. Click the next tab, and CocoaMySQL will display the table’s data for browsing. If you doubleclick on a text field, it’ll open the text up in a separate sheet for editing. Sweet! That sheet, by the way, can also handle any blob-type data, including images.

When in browse mode, CocoaMySQL has the handiest search filter at the top of the window. With it, you can quickly enter a search on any of the table’s fields and see the results instantly display below. I simply haven’t had anything that works as well as this for managing my data, and I’m gonna love using it now that I do!

The last reason CocoaMySQL is now my favorite is that it provides an optional console that slides out in a bottom drawer. When it’s open, you can peruse all the queries that get sent to the server with each click you make on the user interface. This is a great way to learn SQL, among other things. But you can also easily reuse the queries… In fact, CocoaMySQL has a handy query library where you can save and recall commonly used queries. This is a great feature that shows up in several of these database tools.

DBVisualizer

DBVisualizer is available in a free version for personal, noncommercial use, but also has an upgraded “Personal” license for $129. It’s a distinction I won’t be investigating, because this is one of the worst applications in the group. It’s a java-based interface created by developers who obviously neither know nor care about how to build software for Mac OS X. Although it looks promising at first glance, don’t let that fool you. Sneeze on DBVisualizer, and its many windows will shrivel up like flimsy slips of paper.

This is one of only two apps in this group that was so difficult to set up that I gave up. I had a hint this wasn’t going to “just work” when I found I had to download a MySQL jdbc driver in order to get the thing going. Even doing that, however, didn’t satisfy. DBVisualizer simply refused to accept the driver, and eventually I had enough of trying.

DBVisualizer isn’t the ugliest application here, but it’s certainly one of the least friendly. (Although I couldn’t get it going, I gave DBVisualizer the benefit of the doubt when it came to rating its Power and Range.)

iSQL Viewer

I downloaded iSQL Viewer only because the developer for YourSQL cited it as a source… iSQL is an open source project that appears to have ceased work a few years ago, but you can still download their cross-platform viewer software.. If you’re as impatient as me, though, I’d advise you to not bother.

Like DBVisualizer, iSQL was impossible to set up in any normal way, and I wasn’t willing to spend the afternoon figuring out why. In my notes, I wrote that iSQL couldn’t seem to tell me whether the mySQL driver was installed or not, and entering the information I had about the remote service (server name, username, password, database name) wasn’t sufficient. iSQL didn’t know what to do with that information.

Also like DBVisualizer, iSQL has a pleasant-looking interface. If I had been able to figure out the secret code to gain entrance to its inner workings, we might have been friends. But alas, it was not to be.

MySQL Query Browser

This is the tool being developed by the MySQL team itself. On looks alone, I’d rate MySQL Query Browser the tops in this class, and it’s not a bad application all around. This is the only one of the bunch that implements tabs, thus enabling easy management of multiple sessions within a single window. It also has browser-like back/forward buttons for navigating back through your query sessions. It’s a very likeable application that’s easy to set up and intuitive for most functions.

As you might expect, this software excels in providing tools to delve into the deep mysteries of MySQL. You’ve got a handy MySQL reference book embedded, as well as excellent query-building tools. MySQL Query Browser also is among the best here at importing and exporting data. Not only can you do CSV, SQL, and XML, but you can also export to HTML and plist formats. Like CocoaMySQL, it’s easy to export result sets or whole groups of tables.

So… what’s not to like? Well, for one thing, it’s kind of pokey. CocoaMySQL would have my data up and out the door before the MySQL software started thinking seriously about fetching it. A show-stopper for me was that it provides no way to edit textual data (or blob data). And though you can browse the data, you have to take an extra step to do so… unlike the other open-source Cocoa tools here, which just show the data when you’d expect without any effort on your part. Finally, although the interface is pretty, it’s very easy to mess up. The panes have little icons at the top of the scrollbar gutters, which do some sort of split routine. Unfortunately, there are no tooltips to explain what they’re splitting or why. All I know is that every time I tried, my data would disappear and I couldn’t get it back without starting all over. I’m sure I was just being stupid, but then good software needs to take stupid users into account.

Navicat

As I mentioned in one of the comments to a reader who inquired about Navicat, I’m not sure why I left this fine software out of the running. Temporary brain freeze, I suspect. I had downloaded Navicat to try out some months back, but it didn’t get written down where I’d remember.

In any case, I’m glad someone asked, and I was happy to try Navicat out finally. I’m still not sure whether I’ll shell out $100 for it, but I’ll definitely try out some of its more advanced features—such as support for views, stored procedures, scheduling, and replication—and maybe learn to need something that I don’t yet know I need. For the basics, Navicat is right up there with YourSQL and CocoaMySQL. Like them, it can easily enable editing of textual or blob fields, and it has excellent import/export tools. Browsing data, adding data, editing and adding tables are all tasks that are easy to accomplish in an interface that’s easy to understand. (I haven’t done scientific speed tests to confirm this, but I would swear that CocoaMySQL is faster than Navicat when it comes to loading tables and data… but the difference isn’t great.)

The open source tools do have a trick or two that Navicat could benefit from. The main one is an embedded search field. I know you’re supposed to query the database using SQL. But hey, if the software can form the query for me and let me just enter my search term, that’s an advance for usability. Why make me enter “select * from categories where category_name like ‘%mac%’” when I could just type “mac” into a search field while selecting the categories table?

Likewise, I couldn’t find any way to easily dump some SQL for a selection of tables or rows. You can dump SQL for the whole database or for individual tables, but it’s not at all obvious how to export a result set as a SQL script. Navicat has great support for import and export in XML, CSV, TXT, and DBF formats, however.

The last point I noted about Navicat is that its user interface is pretty clunky. Like a lot of Windows software, it relies on popping up new windows for just about everything you want to do. Meanwhile, Navicat lets its main window go to waste, hardly using it for anything at all except listing your tables and other library items. By contrast, YourSQL and CocoaSQL use the third pane for loading whatever task you’re working on, and that’s where you can load, browse, and change data, etc. Navicat has a lot of functions to offer, and if you opened a new window for several of them at once, you’d have a lot of very-similar-looking windows to manage. In this case, use of tabs in the main window would be really helpful.

One missed opportunity for the main window, which also leads to some confusion on this newcomer’s part, is the way the toolbar buttons work. Each button first loads a set of subordinate buttons on the “lower” toolbar, and each of these opens a new window when clicked (except for the “Delete” buttons). The weird part is what happens when you first click a main toolbar icon–for example, “Query”. Unless you notice the change in the lower-level buttons, it appears at first that nothing has occurred. This is because the right-hand pane of the main window—which is where you probably expect something to happen—merely gets washed clean, totally blank. Seems like it would make some sense to use this pane for something at this point, both as a clue to users that something has happened and as a way of saving them a click. For example, if your interface wasn’t so heavily reliant on separate windows, you could load one of the functions for “Query”—for example, the query builder—into that pane by default. Just a thought…

PGnJ

PGnJ is a pleasant-looking Cocoa client for MySQL that is a promising start, but not yet fully cooked. There are some nice touches—browsing data is just a double-click on a table name, and you’ve got HTML export as well as export to XML and CSV—but there are too many missing pieces for production use. For example, there’s nothing within the interface that lets you execute queries… you have to invoke a function in one of the application menus for that. Similarly, I saw no way to add tables other than cooking up a SQL query from scratch. And of course, you can’t edit textual data unless you want to crawl around inside a single-line spreadsheet cell all day. If the developer continues work on it, PGnJ might evolve nicely from here. It already has a lot of speed, and it handles PostgreSQL databases in addition to MySQL.

RazorSQL

RazorSQL is another member of the iconitis club, which put me off from the get-go. Like some others here, it also pissed me off by making me download and install a MySQL jdbc driver. At least that step resulted in a working setup (unlike some others), but it still put me in a foul mood. Just when I was getting over that, I realized that by default, RazorSQL was going to maximize every one of its windows every single time, in order to consume my entire monitor real estate. Hmm… and here I thought that kind of GUI behavior had been made illegal here, just as it was on Mars several years ago.

Once I settled down, I determined that browsing RazorSQL was easy, and the interface in general was pretty intuitive. Adding rows to tables initially looked interesting: RazorSQL doesn’t immediately add your data, but rather generates some SQL that you execute to add your data. This would be kind of interesting except that you can’t edit the generated SQL! As I wrote in my notes, this is a problem when the generated SQL generates SQL errors… you have to go back and generate the SQL again rather than just fixing it by hand. Furthermore, I could find no way to get around having to escape apostrophes in entering textual data. Unless I did so, RazorSQL would throw each query back at me and scream bloody murder.

No, thanks. Next!

SQLGrinder

Of the commercial products in this list, SQLGrinder came closest to tempting me. If it were able to handle textual data-editing in the manner of YourSQL and CocoaMySQL, I wouldn’t be simply tossing it out of consideration. Its other main weakness is relatively poor export functions: I could only export to CSV without using SQL, which means it doesn’t even do table dumps from within the GUI. At first, I didn’t think it was possible to export result sets, but then I tried copying and pasting from SQLGrinder to a text editor and spreadsheet application… it does, in fact, paste CSV format in this manner.

Still, SQLGrinder has a very nice, intuitive interface, and it provides a handy search form which makes free-form querying a snap. The layout of its interface is similar to YourSQL, which I also like a lot.

One other fairly serious weakness I noted was an inability to add table rows without writing and executing a SQL query. Given the ease with which other (free) apps here handle this functionality, why would I bother doing this? I’m sure SQLGrinder has a lot of advanced functionality that would appeal to database admins, especially if you have to manage more than just MySQL. But that ain’t me, and I’ve got nothing to gain by spending $59 on SQLGrinder. (Lovely application icon, though!)

YourSQL

All those things I said about CocoaSQL…? Most of them go for YourSQL as well. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, this was my favorite tool going into the shootout, and it ends up in second place.

So, does it top CocoaMySQL in any way? Well, it’s a little prettier and has a nicer icon. I also like its search filter a little better, although it’s not as flexible. What I like is that it searches on all fields at once, whereas CocoaMySQL does only one at a time. It’s also integrated into the interface in a much more Mac-like way that’s just obvious and easy to use.

So, why isn’t it still Number One? YourSQL is quite a bit pokier than CocoaMySQL, and it crashes occasionally when trying to do too much. When it doesn’t crash, you get the spinning beach ball for too long. Besides that, YourSQL only exports to SQL and CSV… and I think I’m going to find XML export a real bonus here soon. Furthermore, it has no handy way of exporting result sets, unlike CocoaMySQL. Finally, although YourSQL has the text-editing requirement down, it takes an extra click to get there. Not a biggie, but as they say, “Every little click counts!”